Richard J. Shaw

I have had more than 10 years’ experience as a clinical medical physicist, certified by the American Board of Radiology in Therapeutic Radiation Physics. I have the expertise in business administration and management of multimillion-dollar radiotherapy device installation and quality assurance. On a routine basis, I perform radiation simulation, radiation treatment optimization, measurement verification, and support of radiotherapy clinical trials. Since coming to the University of New Mexico Comprehensive Cancer Center in 2016, I have sought research opportunities that would expand the efficacy of radiation therapy, finding alternative methods to battle cancer while reducing the radiation burden to the rest of the body. My most active project is the introduction of energy modulated radiotherapy. Energy modulated radiotherapy blends a low and high radiation spectrum to provide variety of radiation spectra to treat with. Energy modulation adds new dimensions to treatment planning where the optimization not only changes field aperture, beam trajectory, and intensity, but now controls beam penetration and penumbra. My PhD thesis was supported by a startup radiotherapy device manufacturer, Tomotherapy Inc., which started from a NIH grant, became a publicly traded company, and is now a product that is being sold world-wide. I have constructed the widest range dual energy CT device ever attempted, which required: the installation of two radiation sources (one source was a conventional radiographic x-ray tube and the other was a medical linear accelerator), synchronizing these sources with a computed tomography (CT) detector, and creation of a dedicated CT image processing software. Outside of medical applications, my thesis work had implications for non-destructive testing, producing atomic number dependent images. In another research project, the concept of gantry-free CT scanning was proposed; this required a deep understanding of image processing techniques, much of these algorithms have similarities to what is used in treatment planning optimization. I am active in regional/national professional organizations and sub-committees for American Association of Physicists in Medicine. These interactions are convenient mechanism to share and collaborate with physicists around the world.