Medical physics faculty
Christopher L. Bartee
Nesrin Dogan
Mirek Fatyga
James Gordon
Jeremy Horn
Geoffrey Hugo
Martin J. Murphy
Andrei Pugachev
Mihaela Rosu
Habeeb Saleh
Jeffrey V. Siebers
Ford Sleeman
Dorin A. Todor
Jeffrey F. Williamson
Yan Wu
Lisha Zhang
Dandan Zheng
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Mr. Bartee began his career in 1983 with the United States Air Force, where he received extensive training in radio-frequency production and radar. In 1990, Mr. Bartee joined Varian Oncology Systems as a senior field service engineer, where he was trained primarily on state-of-the-art medical linear accelerators. Since 1998, Mr. Bartee has been the senior clinical engineer for the Department of Radiation Oncology, and his activities include management of all the medical linear accelerators and simulators and research in intensity-modulated radiotherapy, electronic portal imaging and respiratory gating. |
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Dr. Dogan joined the Clinical Physics faculty of the Department of Radiation Oncology in November 2003. Dr. Dogan received her Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering in 1993 from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Following her graduation, she became a postdoctoral fellow in Radiation Oncology Department at the University Michigan, where she was involved in research developing interactive and computer-aided optimization tools for 3-D conformal radiotherapy. In December 1995, Dr. Dogan joined CMS. Inc., in St. Louis, ML as a medical physicist where she was involved in developing software for radiation treatment planning. In August 1998, she joined the medical physics faculty at Loyola University Chicago Medical School where she became involved in clinical research and development for Intensity Modulated Radiation Therapy. Dr. Dogan left Loyola in November 2003, where she was an associate professor, to join the medical physics faculty at VCU and she is currently the director of clinical physics, clinical physics residency program and the group leader of Clinical IMRT Physics. She brings extensive clinical research background in Intensity Modulated Radiation Therapy as well as in external beam radiotherapy and brachytherapy. Her research interests include intensity modulated radiotherapy planning, delivery and QA techniques, optimization, Monte carlo treatment planning and image-guided adaptive radiation therapy. |
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Dr. Fatyga joined the Clinical Physics faculty of the Department of Radiation Oncology in June 2004. Dr Fatyga received his PhD in Nuclear Physics in 1986 from the Indiana University in Bloomington, IN. Following his graduation, he became a staff member at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, NY. He worked on basic research in the area of Relativistic Heavy Ions and Particle Physics until 1994. In 1994, he joined Loyola University Medical Center in Chicago as a postdoctoral student in Medical Physics. In 1995, he joined Computerized Medical Systems in St. Louis Mo, as a Medical Physicist. While there, he was responsible for the design of the 3-D Brachytherapy Treatment Planning Package that became part of the Focus 3-D Treatment Planning System. In 1997, he joined Lucent Technologies in Naperville Il, as a Member of Technical Staff. During his stay at Lucent, he worked on software development for Circuit Switched Telephony and Optical Telecommunications. In 2001, he joined Circadiant Systems in Allentown PA, where he continued to work on the software development for Optical Telecommunications. His research interests include software development for radiation therapy, and applications of radiobiology to treatment planning. |
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Dr. Gordon received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of Tasmania, Australia, in 1987. After graduation he worked in telecommunications research and consulting for Bell Communications Research, Hewlett-Packard and other corporations. His work at that time involved the performance analysis and optimization of telecommunications networks. In 2005, Dr. Gordon completed a Master of Applied Science in Medical Physics at the Queensland University of Technology, Australia, after which he worked as a clinical physicist in the Department of Radiation Oncology, Princess Alexandra Hospital, Brisbane, Australia. Dr. Gordon became assistant professor in the VCU Department of Radiation Oncology in September, 2007. His research interests include robust treatment planning techniques for Intensity Modulated Radiation Therapy (IMRT) and Image Guided Radiation Therapy (IGRT), and the use of Electronic Portal Image Devices (EPIDs) for radiation therapy quality assurance. |
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Mr. Horn began his career in 2000 with Computer Sciences Corporation as a junior test engineer and programmer analyst, where he tested and analyzed software systems responsible for the control and release of high energy events. In 2003, Mr. Horn joined Northrop Grumman Corporation, Defense Mission Systems division as a lead software safety engineer. During his service with Northrop Grumman, Mr. Horn was responsible for hazard analysis, risk assessment, and the design and implementation of mitigation strategies to reduce overall system mishap risk. In May 2008, Mr. Horn graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University with a MS in Medical Physics and joined the clinical physics staff in the fall of 2008. His clinical interests include improvement and execution of quality assurance program, LDR & HDR brachytherapy, and stereotactic radiosugery (SRS/SBRT). |
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Dr. Hugo received his Ph.D. in biomedical physics from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2003. After obtaining his degree, he joined the staff of William Beaumont Hospital, where he participated in the clinical implementation of cone beam CT and was actively involved in developing an adaptive radiotherapy program for lung cancer. He joined the VCU Department of Radiation Oncology in 2008 as an assistant professor. His research interests include respiration and motion management, image-guided adaptive radiotherapy for lung cancer, and improving dynamic techniques to image moving anatomy. |
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Dr. Murphy received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago in 1980. Subsequently, he held research posts in nuclear physics, astrophysics, X-Ray and gamma-ray astronomy at UC/Berkeley's Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, the University of Washington, and the Lockheed Space Sciences Laboratory in Palo Alto CA. In 1992, Dr. Murphy became involved in research and development for the CyberKnife, a robotic image-guided radiosurgical system invented at Stanford University to treat cancer and central nervous system lesions. In 2003, he moved from Stanford, where he was a senior research scientist, to join the Medical Physics faculty at VCU. His research interests are in image fusion, computer-guided medical image segmentation, real-time image processing and registration, and machine vision applied to radiotherapy. The goal of his research is to develop fast, automatic image-guided procedures for the planning and delivery of radiation treatments via both external beams and brachytherapy. |
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Dr. Pugachev received his Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Stanford University where he was working on beam angle optimization for intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT). After graduation in 2002 he joined Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center first as a Research Fellow and then as an Instructor. There he received training in clinical nuclear medicine physics and worked on different aspects of pre-clinical validation of positron emission tomography (PET) tracers. Before joining VCU in 2008, Dr Pugachev was employed by Toronto Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre as a Scientist and University of Toronto as an Assistant Professor. His main research interest is the use of PET imaging in radiation oncology for both treatment planning and response assessment. |
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Dr. Rosu joined the Department of Radiation Oncology in 2007. She received her Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences from the University of Michigan in 2005. Following graduation Dr. Rosu was a postdoctoral fellow in the Radiation Oncology Department at the University of Michigan and her research represented one of the first comprehensive studies of the influence of motion in three-dimensional and four-dimensional treatment planning in deformable organs using Monte Carlo dose computation engine. Her current research interests include further investigations of the motion effects on dose calculation, treatment delivery and clinical outcomes. |
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Dr. Saleh joined the Clinical Physics faculty of the Department of Radiation Oncology in 2006 after completing a medical physics residency at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, MD. Prior to that he was a senior research scientist at Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates Inc (WJE) where he worked in the area of Experimental Nuclear Physics, Image Processing, and X-Ray Computed Tomography. Before joining WJE, Dr. Saleh was a post-doctoral fellow with the National Academy of Science where he worked on experimental nuclear physics, and nondestructive testing of material. Dr. Saleh received his Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from the Texas A&M University, where his work included collaboration with the Oak Ridge National Laboratories (ORNL) and the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute (JEARI) to design experiment to measure neutron emission from actinide isotopes. His research interests include image-guided radiation therapy, cranial/extracranial stereotactic radiotherapy, and Quality Assurance (QA). |
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Dr. Siebers received his Ph.D. in medical physics from the University of Wisconsin in 1990. After obtaining his Ph.D., he assisted in developing the proton beam radiation therapy program at Loma Linda University Medical Center. His research expertise is in achieving accurate dose evaluation for three-dimensional conformal radiation therapy (3DCRT) and intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT), particularly using Monte Carlo transport simulation of therapy treatment systems. |
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Mr. Sleeman received his M.S. in Computer Engineering from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2007. During his M.S. study, he developed an autopilot control system for small unmanned aerial vehicles. After obtaining his M.S., he worked for SENTEL Corporation, an engineering services company headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia. As a software engineer at SENTEL, Mr. Sleeman wrote software to integrate sensors into physical security systems for government facilities. A member of the VCU faculty since 2007, his research interests include control systems, parallel computing, embedded systems, and signal processing. |
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Dr. Todor joined the Clinical Physics faculty of the Department of Radiation Oncology in 2001. Prior to that, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, where he was involved in radiological physics research in brachytherapy, the creation of a novel method for real-time intraoperative dosimetry of permanent prostate implants, and external beam portal image processing and enhancement. Dr. Todor received his Ph.D. from Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA., where his work included collaboration with the Radiation Oncology and Biophysics Departments at Eastern Virginia Medical School. His clinical activities include LDR and HDR brachytherapy for prostate and breast cancer treatment. Currently funded by a grant from the American Cancer Society, Dr. Todor is actively involved in a number of research projects dealing with intraoperative assessment of LDR implants, the automatic tracking of markers in EPID images for lung treatments and real-time imaging techniques for HDR breast catheter implants. His long-term goals are the development of a brachytherapy-like system for the planning and delivery of gene therapy and the establishment of new techniques for the analysis of dose distributions in tissues. |
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Dr. Williamson received his Ph.D. in biophysical sciences in 1982 from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Prior to coming to VCU’s Massey Cancer Center, he was a senior faculty member in the Department of Radiation Oncology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Mo., where he solidified his national reputation as an innovative researcher in brachytherapy. Dr. Williamson has several National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded projects in the physics of this modality and is currently looking at novel methods for using imaging technology to improve the planning and delivery of brachytherapy to patients. One of his primary goals with this research is to extend the well-established role of Monte Carlo simulation as an accurate dosimetry tool to individual treatment planning. Dr. Williamson is also working in the area of deformable image registration. The goal of this research is to model distortion and movement of internal organs due to brachytherapy applicator insertion, tumor regression and changes in patient position. |
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Mr. Wu received an M.S. from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Automation at Tianjin University in Tianjin, China, in 1985 and an M.S. from the Department of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton in Southampton, United Kingdom, in 1992. He lectured and conducted research at both universities as well as at the University of Portsmouth in Portsmouth, United Kingdom, prior to working as a research associate in the Department of Radiation Oncology at William Beaumont Hospital in Michigan. A member of the VCU faculty since 1999, his research interests include delivery techniques of intensity-modulated radiotherapy, optimization, signal processing and neural networks. |
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Dr. Lisha Zhang received her MS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Michigan in 2003, and 2004 respectively. During her Ph.D study, she worked on designing and developing a Compton gamma-ray probe for prostate imaging. After obtaining her Ph.D., she joined the Washington University in St. Louis, Department of Radiation Oncology as a medical physics resident and obtained clinical radiation oncology physics training in external beam radiation therapy, brachytherapy and special procedures. In 2007, she joined the Virginia Commonwealth University, Department of Radiation Oncology, where she is currently an assistant professor. Her current research interest includes statistical image reconstruction and image-guided radiation therapy. |
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