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) 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 Radiotherapy (DYMBER); (b) Standard Electron Beam Application using a Photon Multi Leaf Collimator; (c) Independent Dose Calculation and Dosimetric Impact of Implants in the Context of Robotic Stereotactic Radiotherapy; (d) Efficient Quality Assurance for External Beam Radiotherapy and Accurate Dose Calculation for Brachytherapy; (e) Medical Imaging Related Research Topics
- Radiation biology research: (a) Genomic landscapes of metastatic head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) tumors; SPRR2A in invasiveness and therapeutic resistance in HNSCC; (b) Immune signatures to predict chemoradiation-induced toxicities in HNSCC patients; (c) A MET CAR T-cell immunotherapy combined with radiation therapy in glioblastoma multiforme; (d) Identification of synthetic lethal interactions for CHK2-deficient cancers; (e) Functional characterizations of a newly identified MET receptor tyrosine kinase phosphorylation site in cancer and in context of autism-spectrum disorders; (f) The effect of small cohort sizes and population heterogeneity on differential expression analysis
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
Grants
SNSF; EU; Innosuisse; Krebsliga; SAKK; Werner and Hedy Berger-Janser Foundation; Ruth & Arthur Scherbarth Foundation; Insel DLF; Insel DLF and Faculty of Medicine; sitem-Insel Support Funds; Merck; VARIAN
