Profile
Teaching
Undergraduate lectures are provided for students in medicine, physics, biomedical engineering, molecular and biomedical sciences as well as in dental medicine at the University of Bern; undergraduate teaching does also include practical training for medical students; lectures are given within the master in “Artificial Intelligence in Medicine” at University of Bern; postgraduate lectures in medical physics are given at the Department of Physics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich; a CAS program for palliative care is run in cooperation with various faculties of the University of Bern and the Bern University of Applied Sciences; various PhD and MD-PhD positions are provided in radiation biology, medical physics, and palliative care
Clinical Research
(a) Prostate cancer: salvage radiotherapy, metabolomic signatures; (b) head neck cancer: Upfront neck dissection in the context of primary radiotherapy; single vocal cord irradiation; POLARES (Personalized discovery and validation multi-Omics pLAtform for Recurrent hEad and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma) (c) brain tumor: automatic segmentation of brain tumors, postoperative radiosurgery; (d) Total Neoadjuvant Treatment with HYPErthermia in high risk extremity and trunk soft tissue sarcoma (TNT-HYPE); (e) Impact of MRI for planning and followup of SBRT in spinal metastases; (f) palliative care: advance care planning, early integration of palliative care; best care for the dying patient; community palliative care, regional networks
Medical physics research
(a) Dynamic Trajectory Radiotherapy (DTRT) and Dynamic Mixed Beam Arc Therapy (DYMBARC); (b) Standard Electron Beam Application using a Photon Multi Leaf Collimator; (c) Very High Electron Energy Radiotherapy; (d) Independent Dose Calculation and Dosimetric Impact of Implants in the Context of Robotic Stereotactic Radiotherapy; (e) Efficient Quality Assurance for External Beam Radiotherapy and Accurate Dose Calculation for Brachytherapy; (f) Medical Imaging Related Research Topics
Radiation biology research
(a) Genomic landscapes of metastatic and recurrent head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) tumors; SPRR2A in invasiveness and therapeutic resistance in HNSCC; (b) Immune signatures predictive of chemoradiation-induced toxicities in HNSCC patients; (c) Functional characterizations of a newly identified MET receptor tyrosine kinase phosphorylation site in physiological conditions and cancer; (d) Investigation of algorithms for data from next-generation sequencing, genomic and transcriptomic data in particular; (e) Work with the International Cancer Genome Consortium on standardized pipelines for omics data
Data science and artificial intelligence
(a) The effect of small cohort sizes and population heterogeneity on differential expression analysis; (b) Automatic segmentation of brain metastasis and primary brain tumors; (c) Exploring of large language models in radiation oncology
External Partners
Multidisciplinary and multi-institutional national and international collaboration within the SAKK & EORTC networks; Institute for Biomedical Engineering, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zürich, Switzerland; Princess Margaret Cancer Center, Toronto, Canada; ACRF Image X Institute, University of Sidney, Australia; Department of Clinical Medicine, Aarhus University, Denmark; Carleton Laboratory for Radiotherapy Physics, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada; Oncogenomics Group, Department for BioMedical Research, Bern, Switzerland; Scailyte AG, Basel, Switzerland; Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany; Children's Hospital Los Angeles, USA
Grants
SNSF; EU; Innosuisse; Krebsforschung; Krebsliga; SAKK; Werner and Hedy Berger-Janser Foundation; Ruth & Arthur Scherbarth Foundation; Stiftung für klinisch-experimentelle Tumorforschung; Insel DLF; Insel DLF and Faculty of Medicine; Sitem-Insel Support Funds; Merck; VARIAN
