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null Two national organizations honour former RI-MUHC trainee

A first-place finish for Julien Mégrourèche in the J.R. Cunningham Young Investigators Awards, along with “Best in Physics” award this fall

Dec. 10, 2019

Source: RI-MUHC. A cutting-edge cancer research study that Julien Mégrourèche undertook as a trainee at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC) has earned attention nation-wide this fall.

At the September meeting of the Canadian Organization of Medical Physicists (COMP), Julien Mégrourèche was this year’s first-place winner in the J.R. Cunningham Young Investigators Awards. Presented to the top three speakers in the Young Investigators' Symposium held during the annual COMP meeting, these awards recognize presentations of international calibre. In October he also won a Best in Physics award from the Canadian Association of Radiation Oncology for his abstract in the radiation/medical physics category.

Julien Mégrourèche’s winning presentation at the COMP meeting was on “Development of a hydrated electron dosimeter for in vivo applications in radiotherapy: A proof of concept.” Based on work for his M.Sc. in medical radiation physics at McGill University, which he completed recently in the laboratory of Shirin Abbasi Nejad Enger, PhD, of the Cancer Research Program (RI-MUHC), the project is ambitious. “It aims to develop an accurate, in-vivo dosimeter for measurement of the local dose during radiation treatment,” explains Dr. Abbasi Nejad Enger, “a central goal in radiotherapy as such a dosimeter does not exist today.”

With this project a new avenue of research for precision in-vivo radiation dosimetry will be opened by adapting technologies from frontiers of quantum optics research—fibre cavities, in particular—to radiation measurements in radiotherapy.

Housed in Dr. Abbasi Nejad Enger’s detector development laboratory in the Medical Physics Unit, MUHC, this innovative work is being carried out in collaboration with Jack Sankey, PhD, and Lilian Childress, PhD, of the Department of Physics at McGill University.

Congratulations, Julien!

Learn more on the Canadian Organization of Medical Physicists website
Learn more on the Canadian Association of Radiation Oncology website

Julien Mégrourèche (right) with Shirin Abbasi Nejad Enger, PhD, of the Research Institute of the MUHC
Julien Mégrourèche (right) with Shirin Abbasi Nejad Enger, PhD, of the Research Institute of the MUHC