Dr. Faddegon is a board certified clinical medical physics who is internationally recognized for his research in developing and using Monte Carlo methods for treatment head simulation and dose calculation and his development of new technology to improve accuracy and precision in radiotherapy. The overall objective of Dr. Faddegon’s research is to allow for more aggressive treatment in sites where side effects, local control, and even metastases are a problem through cost-effective solutions to improve the therapeutic ratio.

Current research includes developing TOPAS, the Tool for Particle Simulation, a collaboration of UCSF, MGH and SLAC supported by NIH to improve advanced simulation of radiotherapy in conjunction with the open source Geant4 Monte Carlo simulation toolkit. The initial grant focussed on proton therapy. The renewal grant focused on organ and cell radiobiology. The current NIH U24 grant is through the NCI Informatics Technology for Cancer Research (ITCR) to extend TOPAS to conventional radiotherapy and imaging. Work in parallel is being done to develop TOPAS-nBio with enhanced track structure simulation capabilities in conjunction with Geant4-DNA for physicists, chemists and biologists to better establish the relationship between ionization deposition details, radiation chemistry, and biological effect.

Dr. Faddegons clinical responsibility is physics support of radiotherapy. This includes installation, commissioning, maintenance and quality assurance of equipment and procedures used in radiation treatment planning and delivery. Highlights of Dr. Faddegon’s published clinical development work at UCSF include developing new x-ray targets that are implemented on linacs worldwide for low-dose megavoltage imaging and to reduce downtime, developing the means to treat the whole body over a short distance (3 meters), implementing high precision graticules for patient localization, and determining the means to detect and correct defective circuitry in treatments using virtual wedges.