Juergen Willmann, an international scholar and professor of radiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, passed away in a car accident in Palo Alto on Jan. 8. Willlmann dedicated himself to advancing cancer detection imaging technologies, according to Stanford Medicine in a written release.

Willmann honed a specific diagnostic tool known as targeted contrast microbubbles to detect early tumors and deliver targeted drugs in the body with the help of ultrasound imaging. Over a decade at the School of Medicine, his lab advanced the microbubble work from the bench to animals, all the way to the first clinical imaging trials in humans, in which microbubbles were used to detect breast and ovarian cancer.