Professor Iyer’s laboratory fosters a multidisciplinary environment that bridges physics, chemistry and biology with the aim of training undergraduate, graduate and medical students towards aligning their interests in challenging questions in cancer. They constantly interact with biomedical engineers, medical and radiation oncologists and pathology experts to further our understanding of the clinical manifestations of the various stages of cancer.
Faculty
Michael Lawless, PhD
am an associate professor in the Department of Human Oncology with primary roles in the clinic and research. In the clinic, I focus primarily on the clinical applications of the Siemens Somatom Definition Edge Dual Energy CT scanner. This includes preparation of the CT simulator for clinical use, ongoing quality assurance, implementation of motion management techniques, such as respiratory gating and 4DCT acquisitions, and the use of dual-energy scans to produce images with higher contrast.
Dustin Jacqmin, PhD
I am an associate professor in the Department of Human Oncology with roles in the clinic, research and teaching. In the clinic, my primary focus is patient safety and quality improvement. I serve as the co-chair of our departmental Quality Assurance committee, which oversees many different initiatives related to quality and safety. I also focus on the clinical applications of the TrueBeam radiotherapy platform. This includes preparation of the treatment machine for clinical use, ongoing quality assurance, involvement in the radiosurgery program and implementation of motion management techniques, such as respiratory gating and optical surface imaging.
Patrick Hill, PhD
I am an associate professor in the Department of Human Oncology. My primary role is to provide clinical medical physics services in the Department of Radiation Oncology at the UW Health University Hospital. In the clinic, I perform tasks to ensure that patients are being treated safely and accurately on each day of their treatment. This includes making sure radiation-producing machines are operating correctly and that the quality of a patient’s treatment is maintained from the day they first arrive in our department to the day of their last treatment. I am the lead physicist for the TomoTherapy service and among the primary physics contacts for our radiosurgery program, treatment planning systems, and image processing software.
Andrew Baschnagel, MD
Dr. Baschnagel is actively involved in translational and clinical research. I work closely with basic scientists, physicists and clinicians with the goal of fostering new ideas and translating research findings into the clinic. He has experience studying combinations of radiation and novel radiosensitizers and biomarkers of treatment response in patients and in preclinical models. His current work focuses on improving treatment of non-small cell lung cancer with a focus on brain metastases. He is actively involved at the regional and national level, and I am site PI for multiple national clinical studies here at UW.
Randall Kimple, MD, PhD, FASTRO, MBA
Dr. Kimple’s lab has established one of the largest tissue repositories of head and neck cancer patient-derived xenografts and have helped define best practices for the establishment, passage, and use of these valuable resources. Patient derived xenografts are established in mice directly from patient biopsies and are thought to better represent the biology of their human source than model cell lines grown in plastic tissue culture plates.