Last year, David Rogers, Canada Research Chair in Medical Physics, was only the fourth Canadian ever to receive the William D. Coolidge Award, the highest honour from the American Association of Physicists in Medicine.
This week, he is again being honoured for his outstanding research with one of 10 $15,000 Research Achievement Awards from Carleton. These awards honour faculty for innovative research.
Rogers, a senior member of the Carleton Laboratory for Radiotherapy Physics, uses computer simulations to help improve the treatment of cancer using radiation. The computer simulations allow accurate calculations of how radiation deposits energy in patients and instruments.
“This is one of the most critical things in the treatment of cancer – the correct dosage of radiation,” says Rogers. “Just a little too much or too little can cause long-term health problems or even death.”
Rogers was the principal researcher behind a clinical protocol used in cancer clinics throughout North America to establish the dose delivered to over 600,000 radiotherapy patients a year.
His background includes more than three decades at the National Research Council and eight years teaching at Carleton, where he has made great strides in improving the accuracy of treatment for cancer patients.
He has mentored several graduate students who now hold key leadership positions in the medical physics community throughout North America and Europe. He also helped Carleton’s medical physics PhD program become accredited. Carleton boasts one of the largest graduate programs in medical physics in Canada.
An award-winning author, he is one of two deputy editors of the international journal Medical Physics. He has co-authored numerous user manuals for the Monte Carlo code systems that he helped develop for simulating the transport of electrons and photons in materials. These have become the gold standards in the field.