Complementary Medicine 

Kavita Mishra

University of California San Francisco

San Francisco, USA

Kavita K. Mishra, MD, MPH, is a Professor in the Department of Radiation Oncology, Director of the Ocular Tumor Radiation Therapy Program, and Director of Clinical Programs at the Osher Center for Integrative Health at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF). Dr. Mishra received her undergraduate degree with honors in Biology at Harvard University, her M.D. from UCSF, and M.P.H. degree at the Harvard School of Public Health. She completed her radiation oncology residency at UCSF and thereafter joined the faculty. She has served as PTCOG Ocular Co-Chair leading significant multi-institutional efforts in research and clinical guidelines development. She is a global leader in proton ocular therapy and integrative oncology. Dr. Mishra has published multiple significant research articles and book chapters, delivered invited and plenary presentations globally, educated and trained numerous mentees, and received research awards from national and international organizations. At the UCSF Osher Center she has co-piloted an ongoing group medical visit series on mindfulness practices, organized public health education classes, and contributed to the UCSF Survivorship Wellness series. She is active in the Integrative Oncology Working Group and Society for Integrative Oncology. Dr. Mishra has contributed significantly to public health and health equity efforts in the California school systems during the COVID-19 pandemic with the UCSF Collaborative to Advise on Reopening Education Safely. Dr. Mishra strives to improve patient-centered outcomes and healthcare disparities with a strategic, team-based approach. She is passionate about centering care with a personalized, evidence-informed, and inclusive lens, ultimately to help empower patients, practitioners, teams, and communities.

Maria Die Trill

University of Madrid

Madrid, Spain

Maria Die Trill coordinates Psychooncology at Clínica Universidad de Navarra, Madrid site; is President Emeritus of the International Psycho- Oncology Society; Member of the Advisory Board of Mémora Foundation, and past president of the Spanish PsychoOncology Society. She created the first Psycho-Oncology Unit in Spain after having trained (under a Fulbright Scholarship) and worked at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (New York), the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, the Children´s Hospital (Boston, USA) and Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital (New York) for ten years. She´s held appointments at Harvard University, Medical School and Universidad Complutense (Madrid). Highly involved in teaching activities, author of over 100 publications including two manuals in psychooncology, she organized the 10th World Congress of Psycho-Oncology.
She has received several awards: First International Scholar Award in Medical Crisis Counselling from the Linda Pollin Foundation (NY, USA); Cornelia Perry Award in Public Speaking and the Meaning of Life (Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, USA), First Noemi Fisman Award in Clinical Excellence from the International Psycho-Oncology Society (2008), and recently, the Arthur Sutherland Award from the International Psycho-Oncology Society (Toronto, 2022, a late career award that recognizes sustained and distinguished output in psycho-oncology over a whole career; it is the International Psycho-Oncology Society’s most important award).

Physics Plenary 1: Ultra-High Dose Rate (UHDR) Delivery and Dosimetry

Per Poulsen

Aarhus University Hospital

Aarhus , Denmark

Per Poulsen is a professor in medical physics at the Danish Center for Particle Therapy. One main research interest is motion management in radiotherapy including real-time motion monitoring, motion adaptation and motion-including dose reconstuction. A more recent research topic is FLASH radiotherapy.

Sairos Safai

PSI Paul Scherrer Institut

Villigen, Switzerland

Sairos Safai, Ph.D. is a swiss certified medical physicist employed at the Center for Proton Therapy at PSI and a physicist by training. He leads the „Dosimetry and Imaging“ group in the „Physics Research and Technology“ section. He has been in the field of proton radiation therapy for over 20 years and gained international experience at the Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, USA. He has peer-reviewed publications in several areas of proton therapy, incl. dosimetry, quality assurance, beam modelling, treatment planning techniques, scanning development, motion mitigation techniques, imaging and Flash. In recent years, he has directly supervised or co-supervised research on dosimetry, proton flash, NTPC modelling and 4D treatments. He is a co-author of the AAPM Task Group Report 224 on Proton Machine published in 2019. He is also co-chairman of the working party on Dosimetry within the European Particle Therapy Network (EPTN). He is a lecturer at ETH Zürich for a series of lectures by Prof. Dr. Tony Lomax on Therapeutic Application of Particle Physics and a faculty member of the PSI Winter School for Proton Therapy.

Multi-Disciplinary Panel 1: Post-Proton Treatment Imaging in the Brain – Do We Need to Worry?

David Grosshans

University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center

Houston, USA

Dr. Grosshans is a Professor in the Departments of Radiation Oncology and Experimental Radiation Oncology at MD Anderson Cancer Center. Clinically, as a radiation oncologist, he treats adult and pediatric patients requiring proton therapy. He is a physician scientist and devotes a significant amount of time to research. He has a special expertise, both research and clinical, in particle therapy including the use of multi-field optimized intensity modulated proton therapy (IMPT). His groups ongoing bench research includes investigations of biologic effect variability in proton and carbon ion therapy, including differential DNA damage as a function of physical factors, as well as radiation effects on non-replicative cell types including neurons. He has extensive experience in both in vitro and in vivo radiation biologic effect models and has numerous ongoing collaborations with faculty in radiation physics, neuro-immunology as well as neuroscience investigators at Baylor and Texas Childrens Hospital.

Dirk Wagenaar

Department of Radiation Oncology, University Medical Center Groningen, University of Groningen

Groningen, Netherlands

Dirk Wagenaar is a medical physicist in the proton therapy center in Groningen, the Netherlands since 2018. He finished his PhD thesis in 2022 on “Advanced treatment planning: robust optimization and proton RBE”. As such, his clinical expertise is in proton RBE variations and treatment planning techniques. He is actively involved in the training of medical physicists and is currently the medical physics residency program director. Other professional interests include dose accumulation, pseudo-CT generation, using machine learning, and plan QA automation through python scripting.

Particle Therapy-based Re-irradiation

Charles B. Simone

New York Proton Center

New York , USA

Charles B. Simone, II, MD, FACRO is Research Professor and Chief Medical Officer of the New York Proton Center and Full Member in Radiation Oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He is an internationally recognized expert in innovative thoracic oncology clinical trial strategies and proton therapy for thoracic malignancies and reirradiation. He was previously Thoracic Oncology Service Chief at UPenn and Medical Director of Maryland Proton Treatment Center.
Dr. Simone is an NIH, NSF, and DOD-funded investigator who has published >490 peer-reviewed scientific articles/chapters, given >390 scientific lectures to national/international audiences, and is national Principal Investigator or Co-Chair of 8 NIH-funded cooperative group trials (NRG Oncology=5, SWOG=1, ECOG-ACRIN=1, PCG=1). He is a three-time Association of Residents in Radiation Oncology Educator of the Year Award winner. He is the Proton Collaborative Group (PCG) Board of Directors President.
He Chairs: PCG Lung Committee; NRG Oncology Particle Therapy Work Group; American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) Lung Resource Panel Committee; ASTRO Blue Ribbon Lung Panel; American Radium Society Appropriate Use Criteria Thoracic Committee; Particle Therapy Co-Operative Group Gastrointestinal Subcommittee; American College of Radiation Oncology Annual Meeting Abstracts Committee; and NCI/Radiosurgery Society GRID-Lattice-Microbeam-Flash Radiotherapy Clinical Working Group. He is Annals of Palliative Medicine Editor-in-Chief.

Herman Suit Memorial: Proton vs. Photon Plenary Address

Clinics Plenary 2: Clinical Evidence in Particle Therapy

Steven Lin

The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center

Houston, USA

Dr. Steven Lin is a tenured Professor and Director of Research in Thoracic Radiation Oncology at MD Anderson Cancer Center. Dr. Lin acquired his MD and PhD degrees in the Medical Scientist Training Program at The University of California Irvine Medical School and completed residency training in Radiation Oncology at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. Dr. Lin’s practice focuses on thoracic malignancies, and oversees several clinical trials including the use of proton beam therapy for esophageal cancer and in the combination of immunotherapy with radiotherapy in lung and esophageal cancers. He is also interested in understanding radiation-associated lymphopenia, a common radiation-related toxicity that can impact patient survival and the effectiveness of cancer therapy. He is examining approaches using advanced radiation planning and drug therapies to mitigate its effects in order to improve outcomes in thoracic cancer patients who undergo radiotherapy.

EPTN/European Initiatives Session

Cai Grau

Aarhus University

Aarhus , Denmark

Cai Grau is Professor of Radiation Oncology at the Institute of Clinical Medicine at Aarhus University and heading the interdisciplinary radiotherapy research at the Danish Center for Particle Therapy at Aarhus University Hospital in Aarhus, Denmark. He is Director of the national research center DCCC Radiotherapy (DCCCRT.dk) funded by the Danish Cancer Society and coordinator of the European Particle Therapy Network (EPTN). His main area of interest is research in head and neck oncology, high precision radiotherapy, proton therapy, and health economics in radiation oncology.

Sandro Rossi

Fondazione CNAO 

Pavia, Italy

Sandro Rossi is Director General of the National Centre for Oncological Hadrontherapy in Pavia, commissioned and financed by the Italian Ministry of Health with the purpose of treating oncological patients with innovative techniques based on the use of particle beams (protons and carbon ions). Sandro Rossi coordinated first as Technical Director and since 2008 as Director General, the design, construction and operation of the accelerators and the medical devices for the treatment of patients. More than 600 companies contributed to the construction of the facility for a total budget of about 170 million euros. More than 20 national and international institutions have provided qualified resources and skills to complement a project group which has now 150 people, including physicists, engineers, medical doctors, technicians, health care and administration operative staff. CNAO treated so far more than 4300 patients with very positive results and beamtime is also devoted to research activities with groups coming from all over the world.
Since April 2021, Sandro Rossi is coordinator of the international project HITRIplus (Heavy Ion Therapy Research Integration plus) approved and financed by EU commission (EU Infrastructure grant 2020 number 101008584 ). HITRIplus is a multidisciplinary collaborative project aiming to integrate and advance biophysics and medical research in cancer treatment with heavy ions and in parallel jointly developing innovative technologies for the next generation tools. It is a consortium composed of 22 Institutes from 14 European countries engaging all relevant stakeholders and bringing together the four European ion therapy centres with leading EU industries, academia and research laboratories.
During his career Sandro Rossi has published several scientific articles, is a member of committees and commissions, has participated as a speaker in many conferences and for some years he has taught University courses in Physics and Particle Physics Applied to Medicine. He has also received a contract as a Scientific Associate at CERN to participate to the Proton-Ion Medical Machine Study (PIMMS) and has been Technical Director and board member of the TERA Foundation, Novara.

Francesca Albertini

Paul Scherer Institute

Villigen, Switzerland

Francesca Albertini graduated in Physics and obtained her Master of Science (MSc) in Nuclear Physics from the University of Milan in 2002. During her postgraduate studies in Medical Physics, she started her internship in nuclear medicine at the National Institute for Tumours in Milan. In 2004, she moved to Switzerland, where she completed her radiotherapy training at the Proton Therapy Centre of the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI).
She was fortunate enough to be able to combine a PhD on the evaluation and estimation of the effect of uncertainties for active scanning proton therapy while working as a clinical medical physicist at PSI. Since 2011, when she obtained her PhD in physics at the ETH (Federal Institute of Technology) in Zurich, she has coordinated for 5 years the advancement of the in-house developed treatment planning clinically used at PSI. Research activities then focused on advanced approaches to treatment planning, proton therapy workflow and QA.
For 7 years, she has been the primary investigator of national and international grants on online adaptive protontherapy. She is now the scientific coordinator of the European consortium H2020-MSCA-ITN RAPTOR (Real-time Adaptive Particle Therapy Of canceR), which aims to bring online adaptive therapy into the clinic.

Katia Parodi

Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

Munich, Germany

Katia Parodi received her Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Dresden, Germany, in 2004. She then worked as postdoctoral fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, USA. In 2006 she returned to Germany as tenured scientist and group leader at the Heidelberg Ion Therapy Center, obtaining in 2009 her Habilitation from the Heidelberg University. Since 2012 she is full professor and Chair of Medical Physics at the Physics Faculty of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in Munich, where she initiated a dedicated curriculum for Medical Physics within the MSc in Physics. Her main interests are in high precision image-guided radiotherapy with focus on ions, from computational modeling to experimental developments of novel methods for imaging and in-vivo ion range monitoring for pre-clinical and clinical applications. For her work, Katia Parodi received national and international recognition, including the Behnken Berger Award in 2006, the IEEE Bruce Hasegawa Young Investigator Medical Imaging Science Award in 2009, the AAPM John S. Laughlin Young Scientist in 2015 and an ERC Consolidator grant in 2016. In 2017-2018 she served as president of the German Society for Medical Physics, and is since 2021 the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Physics in Medicine and Biology.

Yolanda Prezado

CNRS-Institut Curie

Orsay, France

Research director at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). She is the founder and head of the interdisciplinary team New Approaches in Radiotherapy (NARA); based at the Institut Curie (France). The main research pathway of the NARA team is the conception and development of innovative methods in radiotherapy, with the aim of reducing its toxicity. One of its main projects is radiotherapy with proton mini-beams, funded by the European Union via an ERC consolidator grant. Yolanda Prezado is a clinical medical physicist (Spain, France) with a multidisciplinary background. She has developed her career mainly in the field of radiotherapy, first at the University Hospital of Salamanca (Spain), then at the Biomedical Line of the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (Grenoble, France) and, since 2011, at the CNRS. She has been chair of the scientific committee of the European Federation of Medical Physicists and is the deputy spokesperson of the International Biophysics Collaboration. Her work in proton therapy has been rewarded with the Mr et Mme Peyre prize of the French Academy of Sciences in 2021.

Olga Sokol

GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research

Darmstadt, Germany

Olga Sokol is a postdoc in Clinical Radiobiology at GSI Helmholtz Centre in Germany. After getting her Master’s Degree in Physics at Moscow State University in 2014, she moved to Germany to start her PhD at the Technical University of Darmstadt. She got a doctoral degree for her work on oxygen beams for therapy and combined multi-ion treatments for hypoxic tumors. Afterwards, she has been working at GSI together with Walter Tinganelli and Marco Durante: first, for the Radiobiology work package within the EU Project INSPIRE, and now for the ERC-funded BARB project that she is going to present in her talk.

Physics Plenary 2: Adaptive Therapy

Stine Korreman

Aarhus Universitet

Aarhus, Denmark

Stine Korreman is Professor of Medical Physics at The Danish Center for Particle Therapy (DCPT), Aarhus University Hospital. She works on robust and adaptive optimization of proton therapy with focus on modelling of anatomical variations. She is part of the EU Horizon2020 MSCA Innovative Training Network “Real-time Adaptive Particle Therapy Of canceR” (in short RAPTOR) project, leading the scientific work package for interventional strategies. She has had a continuous leading role in development and implementation of new technological solutions – e.g. respiratory gating, VMAT and IGRT. She now heads a research group working on application of data science in radiotherapy (including proton therapy), with emphasis on deep learning for image segmentation, data mining in large data sets of images and treatment plans, and individualized risk modelling. Stine Korreman is actively involved in ESTRO, as course faculty and as chair of the ESTRO Medical Physics Future working group on “Artificial Intelligence in Radiation Oncology”, aiming to optimize the quality of AI based treatment and increase the access to radiotherapy. She has spent multiple sabbaticals in the United States, including at Stanford University Cancer Center and University of Wisconsin-Madison, and has multiple ongoing collaborations with research groups both nationally and internationally.

Biology Panel: Disruptive Approaches to Radiation Oncology

Fulvia Vascotto

TRON – Translational Oncology at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz

Mainz, Germany

Dr. Fulvia Vascotto graduated in Molecular Biology at University of Trieste and obtained the PhD in Molecular Immunology at ICGEB (Trieste, Italy).
As post-doctoral fellow, she joined the group of Dr. A.M. LennonDuménil, at the Institute Curie (Paris, France) and identified myosin II as the actin cytoskeleton motor protein involved in the regulation of antigen uptake, trafficking, processing and presentation in B lymphocytes and in dendritic cells. Supported by the EU Marie Curie international program, she joined the laboratory of Prof. Dr. U. von Andrian at Harvard Medical School (Boston, USA), to extend her immunology research in vivo in mice.
In 2011, she moved to TRON, leading the unit of Vaccine and Cellular Immunotherapy. The main research focus of the team is to combine immunotherapies (such as RNA vaccines, small molecules, chemotherapy, local radiotherapy, antibody therapy and TCR transduced T cells) in several pre-clinical cancer models understanding the synergistic anti-tumor effects. Her group is aiming to characterize the cellular and molecular mechanisms involved in the therapeutic effects against cancers focusing on the cellular composition and the phenotype of the tumor immune environment.

Matteo Cerri

University of Bologna

Bologna, Italy

Matteo Cerri, M.D., Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Physiology at the Department of Biomedical and Neuromotor Sciences of the University of Bologna, an associated member of the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN), and an affiliated member of the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), chair of the Topical Team Hibernation of the European Space Agency (ESA), member of the Roadmap Table of Integrative Physiology for the Italian Space Agency (ASI), and in the national board of the Italian Society for Radiation Research (SIRR), and of the Italian Society for Neuroethics (SINe). His research focuses on the neurobiology of hibernation; he was the first to show that it is possible to induce a state mimicking natural hibernation in non-hibernating animals. Currently, he is investigating the mechanism that enhances radiation resistance in pharmacologically-induced hibernators.

Multi-Disciplinary Panel Discussion 2 – New Scenarios for Particle Therapy

Joe Chang

MD Anderson Cancer Center

Housoyn, USA

Dr. Chang holds a tenured Texas 4000 Distinguished Professorship and Director of Stereotactic Ablative Radiotherapy at MD Anderson Cancer Center. He is a Fellow of American Society of Radiation Oncology and have been recognized with the Best Doctors of America award. His clinical practice is specialized in thoracic malignancies, and he is a voting committee member of NCCN thoracic guidelines and co-chair of the international particle therapy PTCOG scientific program committee. As one of the pioneers in the field of stereotactic ablative radiotherapy (SABR), proton therapy and immunotherapy for lung cancer, he published more than 300 peer-reviewed articles in prestigious journals, including LANCET, Nature, JAMA, Journal of Clinical Oncology, Journal of Thoracic Oncology, RED J and various others. His prospective studies including randomized studies comparing surgery vs. SABR in operable stage I lung cancer, stereotactic proton vs. photon radiotherapy in early-stage lung cancer, I-SABR (immunotherapy plus SABR) vs. SABR alone in early-stage lung cancer, concurrent proton therapy and chemotherapy in stage III lung cancer, and the implementation of intensity-modulated proton therapy (IMPT) in lung cancer were the first reported clinical studies. His research has helped to establish the role of SABR, proton therapy, and I-SABR in lung cancer.

Nobuteru Kubo

Gunma university

Maebashi, Japan

EDUCATION:
– Medical Doctor (2001-2007), Gunma University, School of Medicine, Gunma, Japan.
– Doctor of Philosophy (2009-2014), Gunma University, Graduate School of Medicine, Gunma, Japan.
WORK EXPERIENCE:
– Resident (2007-2009), Isesaki Municipal Hospital, Gunma, Japan.
– Clinical Fellow in Radiation Oncology (2009-2010), Tokyo Metropolitan Cancer and Infectious diseases Center Komagome Hospital, Tokyo, Japan.
– Clinical Fellow in Radiation Oncology (2010-2012), Gunma University Hospital, Gunma, Japan.
– Clinical Fellow in Radiation Oncology (2012-2013), Maebashi Red Cross Hospital, Gunma, Japan.
– Clinical Fellow in Radiation Oncology (2013-2016) Gunma University Hospital, Gunma, Japan.
– Assistant Professor in Radiation Oncology (2016-2019) Gunma University Hospital, Gunma, Japan.
– Associate Professor in Radiation Oncology (2019-present) Gunma University Hospital, Gunma, Japan.
GRANTS:
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research Young Scientists (B) (#15K19770 Combination with carbon-ion radiotherapy and chemotherapy for non-small cell lung cancer), Principal Investigator, 2015–2018.
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research Young Scientists (#20K16405, Analysis of the Anti-tumor Immunity Effect of Carbon-ion radiotherapy for Lung Cancer), Principal Investigator, 2020–2023. PROFESSIONAL SOCIETY:
Japan Radiological Society, Japanese Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology, The Japanese Urological Association, Japan Society of Clinical Oncology, The Japan Lung Cancer Society

Lin Kong

Shanghai Proton and Heavy Ion Center/Fudan University Shanghai Cancer Center

Shanghai, China

Dr. Lin Kong obtained her M.D. from the Shanghai Medical College of Fudan University in 2002. After graduation, Dr. Kong started her academic career at the Department of Radiation Oncology at the Fudan University Shanghai Cancer Center (FUSCC), with the specialization in head/neck and CNS malignancies. Dr. Kong started her work at the Shanghai Proton and Heavy Ion Center (SPHIC) in 2014, and pioneered the clinical application of particle radiation therapy in China.
Dr. Kong is active in both clinical practice as well as academic activities. She published more than 70 original articles in international peer-reviewed journals and contributed to more than 10 book chapters.
Profile:
• Head of department of H&N / CNS radiation oncology, Shanghai Proton and Heavy Ion Center (SPHIC)
• Senior Consultant in Radiation Oncology, Shanghai Proton and Heavy Ion Center (SPHIC), Fudan University, Shanghai, China.
• Senior Consultant in Radiation Oncology, Shanghai Cancer Center, Fudan University, Shanghai, China.
• Specialized in head & neck cancer and central nervous system malignant tumor, Proton and Carbon ion beam-based radiation oncology.