Medical Physics
Medical Physics is offered to students who have undergraduate training in physics, engineering, computer science, or related physical sciences who would like to establish a career in medical physics research or clinical service. Students in medical physics experience a wide spectrum of training activities to complement their research, including coursework in radiological physics, imaging, anatomy and physiology, seminars, journal clubs, and clinical rotations.
Research Topics
The research focus of Medical Physics is the development of cutting-edge imaging and therapeutic tools to help cancer radiotherapy treatment. Examples include:
- Medical image reconstruction and application in radiotherapy
- Radiotherapy treatment planning and adaptive replanning
- Deep learning and Artificial Intelligence for radiotherapy
- High-performance computing for radiotherapy, such as Monte Carlo radiation transport simulation
- Modeling of organ motions and development of motion management strategies
- Development of advanced clinical and preclinical imaging and therapeutic approaches
- Modeling radiobiological phenomena and understanding the mechanisms
Accreditation
The Medical Physics track is accredited by the Commission on Accreditation of Medical Physics Education Programs (CAMPEP), which recognizes that our training has met CAMPEP requirements. This is required for students who would like to establish a career in clinical medical physics. The accreditation allows graduates to apply for CAMPEP-accredited residency training and pursue board certification from the American Board of Radiology.
Faculty
Professor
Research Interests: MR medical physics, adaptive radiotherapy, imaging, deep learning, MRI, radiology, NMR, pattern recognition, neuroradiology, AI, artificial intelligence, oncology
Professor
Research Interests: Cloud and GPU-based high-performance computing in medical physics and imaging; automatic radiotherapy treatment planning; adaptive radiotherapy; image-guided radiotherapy; low-dose and dynamic-cone-beam CT
Professor
Research Interests: Adaptive radiation therapy; treatment-plan optimization; radiation-dose calculations
Associate Professor
Assistant Professor
Research Interests: Innovate, develop, and apply artificial intelligence and other advance computational technologies to empower clinicians to improve cancer care
Professor
Research Interests: Tomographic image reconstruction; cone-beam computed tomography; image-guided radiation therapy; medical imaging processing
Associate Professor
Research Interests: Biomedical optics, In Vivo cell tracking, Optical tomography-guided radiation therapy and Ultra-high dose rate irradiation
Assistant Professor
Research Interests: Artificial intelligence, clinical informatics, AI applications for prostate radiotherapy, genitourinary oncology
Assistant Professor
- Zhang Lab
Research Interests: Artificial intelligence; MRI-guided adaptive radiotherapy (MRgART); Large Language Model (LLM) based Al agent
Associate Faculty
These faculty members do not accept graduate students. They participate in teaching, co-mentoring, exam and dissertation committees, and all other program activities.
Associate Professor
Research Interests: Adaptive radiation therapy, MRI-based radiation therapy
Professor
Research Interests: Evaluate the use of newly designed biodegradable stints to treat pulmonary artery stenosis
Associate Professor
Research Interests:Tissue-response modeling in radiation therapy; brachytherapy
Professor
Research Interests: Tissue-response modeling in radiation therapy; stereotactic radiation therapy
Associate Professor
Research Interests: Developing state-of-the-art machine-learning approaches to extract radiological imaging and imaging-genomic biomarkers for individualized prognostics in neuroscience and oncological applications
Professor
Research Interests: Proton Therapy, Artificial Intelligence, PET and PET/MRI Imaging, FLASH
Professor
Research Interests: High-performance computing; infrastructure for radiation therapy; radiobiological effects