? The Graduate Programs in Medical Physics at the University of Chicago offers research training at three levels that lead to the Master of Science degree, to the Doctor of Philosophy degree, and postdoctoral training. Students working toward a graduate degree in medical physics are expected to have completed training equivalent to that required for the S.B. degree in the Department of Physics at the University of Chicago. Postdoctoral trainees are selected from candidates with the Ph.D. degree in Physics or equivalent fields. Primary areas of research interests by the program faculty include: Physics of Diagnostic Radiology, Physics of Nuclear Medicine, Physics of Magnetic Resonance Imaging/Spectroscopy, and Physics of Radiation Therapy. Major research facilities are the Frank Center for Image Analysis, the Kurt Rossmann Laboratories for Radiology Image Research, the Goldblatt MRI Center, the NMR labs, and the Scientific Visualization & Image Analysis Core Facility in the Department of Radiology, and the Medical Physics Division in the Department of Radiation & Cellular Oncology. Unique features of this program are the faculty's focused effort on research in medical imaging and radiation oncology, and on the training of high-level medical physicists. Students and trainees are required to take course work, participate in seminars and journal club meetings, assist in research projects, and complete a research project under supervision of a faculty member. Research projects may be theoretical or experimental studies in digital radiography, diagnostic performance, computer-aided diagnosis, magnetic resonance imaging and spectroscopy, image reconstruction, nuclear medicine imaging, positron emission tomography, computer applications in radiation therapy, dose computation and verification, multi-modality image correlation, or dosimetry. Beyond the medical physics core courses, all trainees take an ethics course on the responsible conduct of research and serve as teaching assistants. The number of current program faculty is 22. The number of current predoctoral students is 18. There are two NIH postdoctoral trainees in the program at the present. The number of trainees for which funding is requested is four per year at the predoctoral level (2 first-year and 2 second-year trainees per year), and 2 per year postdoctoral level. It should be noted that this is a competitive renewal application, written in the 14th year of a medical physics training grant that initiated in NCI and was transferred recently to NIBIB. ? ?
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