Education and Research
The physics faculty works closely with our team of radiation oncologists and medical residents who provide services to approximately 200 patients each day. Medical physics faculty also collaborate closely with colleagues in the Section of Molecular Medicine, other UT Southwestern departments, and other UT campuses.
Graduating residents are expected to be well-prepared for the American Board of Radiology examination in therapeutic radiological physics and are encouraged to become contributing members of the medical physics community at large.
Education
Upon completion of the program, residents are expected to have a solid foundation on which to build an academic career in medical physics. The expected activities, objectives, and assessments to be completed during the residency are well-defined and will be presented to incoming residents upon their arrival.
Didactic courses are available to residents, but the majority of time is spent in “hands-on” clinical rotations.
Research
Approximately half of the physics and engineering faculty are focused primarily on research and are heavily funded by the National Institutes of Health, American Cancer Society, Radiological Society of North America, Cancer Prevention & Research Institute of Texas and various corporations. Our extramural physics research funding is about $15 million.
All research efforts are supported by a dedicated administrative staff, including personnel who handle grants in pre- and post-award phases. Current research projects include:
- AI agent for intelligent context-aware online ART directives
- Clinical implementation of advanced 4D MRI for MRI-guided RT
- Sim-omitted adaptive radiotherapy (ART) credentialling on MR-linac machine
- Optimization of surrogate design and gating workflow using Unity-based CMM for MR-guided radiotherapy
- Expansion of simulation and planning-omitted radiation therapy (SPORT) for adaptive breast patients