Behzard Ebrahimi, Ph.D.

Dr. Behzad Ebrahimi is a clinical medical physicist and researcher who uses quantitative imaging and computational modeling to study radiation biology/pathophysiology. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Physics, alongside a master’s and PhD in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Following his doctoral studies, he completed two sequential postdoctoral fellowships. First, at Mayo Clinic, his research focused on physiological imaging with an emphasis on markers of tissue hypoxia and oxidative stress. He then expanded this work at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, applying multimodality imaging to the molecular probing of RedOx.
In 2018, he completed his residency in therapeutic medical physics at the University of Miami and joined the faculty at the University of Chicago as an Assistant Professor. Over nearly eight years there, his clinical practice focused primarily on stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS) and stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT). He was also deeply involved in education, and served as Associate Chair of the Graduate Program in Medical Physics.
In 2026, he returned to the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, where he is currently a faculty member in the Department of Radiation Oncology.

Dr. Ebrahimi’s teaching interests center on radiation biology and the integration of biological systems thinking into medical physics education. Since 2018, he has taught graduate-level courses in Radiation Biology and Health Physics, with an emphasis on connecting foundational concepts to their relevance in radiation oncology.
He currently chairs AAPM Task Group 476, which focuses on standardizing radiation biology education and developing a common course framework that can be used across medical physics graduate programs.
As a teacher, he advocates for systems thinking when approaching complex problems. Instead of using linear, point-A-to-point-B approaches, he invites students to navigate system uncertainty, identify leverage points, and steer towards optimum outcomes.

Why do patients with apparently similar disease respond differently to the same treatment? Why does an identical radiation therapy regimen lead to tumor control in one patient but treatment resistance in another? Why do healthy tissues react so differently to the same dose of radiation, ranging from full recovery to severe toxicity? And how much of the information needed to understand these differences is already present in medical images but remains unmeasured?
These questions provide a common theme across Dr. Ebrahimi’s research. His work has focused on developing quantitative approaches to extract physiological and biological information from medical images and translate that information into a better understanding of disease and treatment state. His research leverages imaging to characterize tissue state based on underlying processes such as perfusion, oxygenation, metabolism, and spatial heterogeneity.
Adopting a holistic, systems-level perspective, his research posits that radiation oncology outcomes, from physiological trajectory to spatial and temporal dynamics, and response to therapy, are fundamentally driven by the biological system's state, not merely the administered dose. His long-term interest is in building the quantitative foundation needed to move from describing disease toward understanding tissue state, treatment response, and ultimately how this information can be used to individualize therapy.