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.

Ehsan Samei is the Reed and Martha Rice Distinguished Professor at Duke University where he holds five departmental affiliations. He directs the NIH-sponsored Center for Virtual Imaging Trials (CVIT) and co-directs the FDA-sponsored Triangle Center of Excellence in Regulatory Science and Innovation (Triangle-CERSI). His expertise includes clinical physics, quantitative imaging, and relevant use of AI. His passion is to position medical physics and in silico methods to generate and accelerate patient-centric care, and do so through innovative design and compassionate practice. He has authored over 400 referred papers and four books, is a fellow of five professional societies, and was the recipient of the 2022 Marie Sklodowska-Curie Award by the International Organization of Medical Physics. He is the founder of the Medical Physics 3.0 initiative.

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.