I am a graduate student in the University of New Mexico Department of Physics and Astronomy working towards a PhD in medical physics. I recently completed an MS in the UNM Medical Physics Graduate Program.

Research interests

My interest in medical physics centers on cancer therapy with particle beams and computational medical physics. My current research is on charged hadron therapy, with a focus on antiprotons, secondary dose in radiation therapy, and distributed Monte Carlo calculations in radiation therapy planning. I work with the UNM Particle Therapy Group, under my co-advisors Michael Holzscheiter (UNM Physics and Astronomy and Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics) and Shuang (Sean) Luan (Computer Science). Our antiproton work is part of the AD-4/ACE collaboration, with experiments performed at the CERN Antiproton Decelerator.

Some research projects

• Distributed medical physics calculations using cloud computing.
  • "Radiation therapy calculations using an on-demand virtual cluster via cloud computing"
    R.W. Keyes, C. Romano, D. Arnold, S. Luan, arXiv:1009.5282v1 [physics.med-ph]
• Patient specific secondary dose estimation in particle therapy
• dicompyler: an open source radiation therapy research tool with plugins built with Python and Dicom.
  • Lead by Adit Panchal of Midwestern University.

Miscellany et cetera

I co-author a blog with Niels Bassler titled Will Work for Science about medical physics, particle therapy, and computing. You can even follow us on twitter @ww4s

Read my entry to AMD's "What would you do with 48 cores?" contest. I won the grand prize, a 48 core AMD server.

I am a big proponent of the Python programming language. I have found it to be very useful for scientific programming. To this end, I started a discussion group, Python in Medical Physics, to encourage and support medical physics Python users (especially as a replacement for the proprietary Matlab).

I previously completed an MS in Physics from the UNM Dept. of Physics and Astronomy. During that time, I performed research in quantum simulation, quantum measurement and control, and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). I received a BS in Physics from Rice University in Houston, TX.

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