PhD Studentship: Computational Modelling and Testing of Inverse Compton Scattering Sources for Medical Applications

Applications are invited for a fully funded PhD position in the Applied Radiation and Medical Physics Group in the School of Science (Physics Department) at Loughborough University. The successful candidate will work in a collaborative and supportive environment, and will interact with an international network of research centres to apply their physics knowledge and coding experience to cutting edge research in radiotherapy.

In the UK, over 275,000 people are diagnosed with cancer every year, and half of them receive radiotherapy as part of their treatment. Radiotherapy aims to kill cancer cells whilst sparing normal tissues. However, not all cancers can be treated with radiotherapy, including brain tumours in young children, as radiation can affect normal brain development.

Microbeam Radiation Therapy (MRT) may allow treatment of these cancers. Still in a preclinical phase, it uses arrays of parallel X-ray microbeams to blast tumours with radiation while sparing healthy tissue. MRT is delivered with synchrotrons, which are large machines intended for scientific use. In this project, we will investigate new sources (compact Compton sources), which produce synchrotron-like radiation and are potentially usable in hospitals.

The successful candidate will work on Monte Carlo modelling with the toolkit Geant4 to determine the radiation dose these sources can deliver to the human body.

The accuracy of these models will be determined with experiments at recently established compact sources in Europe (France and Italy).

The project will produce evidence on the effectiveness of these compact sources for MRT delivery, whilst also benefitting researchers using the sources in other scientific disciplines.