Biography

I have a BSc Physics from the University of Minho (Braga, Portugal), and have specialised in Medical Physics with an MSc from the University of Porto (Porto, Portugal). During my MSc I spent one year at University College London (UCL) under the Erasmus Lifelong Learning Programme, where I became interested in radiotherapy (namely proton therapy) research.

From 2012 to 2016, I was a PhD student at the Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering at UCL, and a member of the Proton and Advanced Radiotherapy Group. My PhD was funded by a competitive fellowship scheme from the Portuguese Government (Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia). Under the supervision of Prof Gary Royle, I worked on using online CBCT images and deformable image registration to verify if radiotherapy treatments are being accurately delivered. Near the end of my PhD I had to opportunity to spend 6-months as a visiting scholar at University of Pennsylvania for 6-months, where I worked on the commissioning of the world’s first IBA’s CBCT system for adaptive proton therapy of lung cancer.

In April 2016 joined the Centre for Medical Image Computing at UCL as postdoctoral researcher working with Dr Jamie McClelland and Dr David Landau on developing image analysis methods to study radiation-induced lung damage, a common side-effect of lung cancer radiotherapy. Since August 2018, I moved on to a Research Fellowship funded by the Royal Academy of Engineering. I have been working on combining the analysis of complex medical images acquired during cancer treatment and outcome modelling techniques to facilitate predictive modelling of radiation-induced toxic side-effects in childhood cancer patients.

Since my research is very focused on clinical applications. I currently hold an honorary position in the Department of Radiotherapy Physics at University College London Hospital. I was also seconded for 1-month to MedAustron (Wiener Neustadt, Austria) in 2017, where I helped in the early stages of the commissioning a particle therapy clinical facility.