[loarake]

Medical Physics 4th year PhD student

Workday:

- [Variable] Wake up, shower, make coffee, read news.

- [10-11 AM] Take the subway to work (15 minutes)

- [11 AM to 5-6 PM] Work on Monte Carlo simulation or optimisation code / write paper if it's one of those days

- [6-9 PM] Eat dinner with GF while watching something on the computer

- [9 PM - 1 AM] Do some more work (most common option) or play piano or play Rocket League if some friends are around

[trequartista]

Could you elaborate on what does studying medical physics entail? This is the first time I'm hearing about it and I'm curious since this appears to be at the intersection of two unbelievably complex fields (to me at least)

[loarake]

In general, the field is split into imaging research (MRI, CT, Ultrasound, optical imaging) and radiotherapy research. It's a very applied field, the fundamental physics has been figured out a long time ago except for some really niche areas. For example, some people are trying to model particle transport inside DNA itself at the nanometer scale, where the transported particles have very low energies. There's still some physics work to be done there, but it's pretty marginal and the lack of theory in those areas is mostly due to theoretical physicists losing interest rather than the theory being too difficult.

I personally work in radiotherapy, making simplified (faster) Monte Carlo particle transport algorithms for use in treatment planning, and also finding more "modern" optimisation techniques to handle the many degrees of freedom available on radiotherapy linear accelerators to produce higher quality treatment plans compared to what we can do right now. It's hard to define what a high quality treatment plan is without a lot of background, but basically we try to find ways to put more radiation in tumours while sparing the healthy tissue all around the tumour. My "research" is like 95% programming.