Dr Chia-Ho Hua earned his PhD in Biomedical Engineering from The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he studied radionuclide tomographic imaging. He received postdoctoral and clinical training in therapeutic medical physics at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York before being certified by the American Board of Radiology in Therapeutic Medical Physics in 2004. Dr Hua joined the faculty at St. Jude in 2005 and is currently a full member and the Director of Medical Physics Research in Radiation Oncology. His research aims to improve proton therapy targeting accuracy, advanced imaging for precision radiation oncology, and predictive modeling for tumor response and radiation late effects in children. Dr Hua is also the Physics Committee Chair of the Children’s Oncology Group Radiation Oncology Discipline and the steering committee member of the Pediatric Normal Tissue Effects in the Clinic (PENTEC) international consortium. In 2023, Dr Hua was elected as a Fellow of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (FAAPM).

Professor Karen Jones is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide, a Principal Medical Scientist at the Royal Adelaide Hospital and an Adjunct Professor at the University of South Australia (UniSA). Her initial training was as a nuclear medicine technologist, graduating, in 1991, from UniSA as the top nuclear medicine student. In 1998, she was the first nuclear medicine technologist in Australia to be awarded a PhD, undertaking these studies in the Adelaide Medical School, University of Adelaide. Karen’s research capitalises on the use of nuclear medicine and ultrasound techniques to investigate gastric motor function, gastrointestinal blood flow, and postprandial blood pressure, particularly as they relate to diabetes. She is an author of 350 publications which have been cited more than 21,000 times. She has been the recipient of several awards and supervised more than 40 research students. Karen is a passionate advocate for nuclear medicine technologists, and has held multiple leadership roles – currently, President of the Australian and New Zealand Society of Nuclear Medicine and Governing Board Member of the National Imaging Facility in Australia.

Professor Nayana Parange is the Professor of Medical Sonography at the University of South Australia. She holds qualifications in medicine, specialist training in Obstetrics and Gynaecology, ultrasound, and education and a PhD.  She is active in teaching, research, industry and community engagement and is a leading expert internationally in clinical ultrasound training in diverse settings, ranging from primary health care to tertiary maternal fetal medicine setting.

Prof Parange is committed to research, with a focus on promoting health equity, to ensure that all individuals have access to the resources, services and support they need to live healthy and fulfilling lives. She is dedicated to exploring new ideas and approaches to improving clinical practice and clinical education using evidence-based practice to ensure development of safe and competent practitioners. She is instrumental in the development and delivery of ultrasound workshops on site and mentored trainers to teach life-saving point-of-care-ultrasound diagnostic skills to midwives and doctors across many LMIC countries. The aim of these educational initiatives is to improve antenatal care in regional and remote communities to help reduce adverse pregnancy outcomes and thereby reduce maternal fetal mortality in regional, remote communities within Australia and developing countries.

The research projects that Prof Vozenin has developed with her team primarily aim to discover innovative tools to protect normal tissue and enhance tumor control. Her significant accomplishment has been the development of a groundbreaking radiation therapy technique called FLASH-Radiotherapy, which offers to reduce normal tissue toxicity and eradicate tumors in various organs, including the brain, lungs, and skin. She has successfully tested this new approach of RT on multiple species, including mice, zebrafish, mini-pigs, and cats. Her efforts have primarily focused on exploring the distinct biological reactions triggered by FLASH exposure on normal tissue and tumors, and recently, we found that FLASH could overcome radiation resistance. A crucial aspect of her work involves ensuring the advancement of FLASH-RT into safe and meaningful clinical trials for human cancer patients.