Roles
- Professor of Clinical Radiation Oncology
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Biography
My career in medical physics began with a PhD in Physics at University of Connecticut where my thesis involved Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, followed by training as NIH Post-doctoral Fellow at University of Pennsylvania where I became expert in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). I remained on the faculty at PENN in the Radiology department for ten years and was successful in obtaining extramural grant funding including Principal Investigator on an NIH Shared Instrumentation Grant, and also served as Deputy Editor for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine. For a period of time between 1999 and 2009 I left academia to pursue various opportunities at small startup companies, mostly concerned with medical imaging. These positions imbued me with project management skills that are very useful in conducting funded scientific research. During that time I received a patent for an intravascular MR probe, and was awarded a grant from the EPA for an MR-based device to monitor drinking water. Starting in 2009 I made the transition to radiation oncology, and completed my clinical training under Dr. Jeff Williamson at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2015 as a board-certified therapy medical physicist. Currently at University of Miami I am a clinical therapy medical physicist, pursue research in various MRI-related areas of cancer treatment, and teach students and residents. My daily experiences in the clinic are invaluable in appreciating relevant problems that can be addressed by translational research. -
Education & Training
Education
Post Graduate Training
Licensures and Certifications
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Honors & Awards
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Teaching Interests
In our department I participate in teaching radiation oncology medical residents and medical physics residents mostly in imaging physics. Additionally, I help mentor the physics residents during their training, and currently am working with a Masters level Biomedical Engineering graduate student with a special imaging project. Furthermore I am working with a post-doc who is helping me to build a small-animal MRI device, and this involves teaching MRI physics to him. Finally, in the Fall 2018, I will be teaching a didactic graduate course on Physics of Radiation Therapy. -
Research Interests
An important aspect of my research has been the exploration, via theoretical analysis, computer modeling, pre-clinical experimentation and analysis of clinical image data, of the relationships between the underlying physiology of normal and diseased tissue and its appearance on quantitative MR images. Ongoing research with my departmental colleagues focusses on utilization of daily MR images provided by ViewRay, our hybrid MRI/radiotherapy treatment machine, to predict tumor response to radiation and optimally adapt therapy during treatment. To this end I wrote and am P.I. on an IRB protocol that affords a registry of ViewRay patient clinical data and images. A major thrust of my current research is use of machine-learning based radiomic MR image texture analysis to build models of tumor response. -
Publications
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Professional Activities