Student NameJulia Withrow
Faculty Mentor NameDr. Wesley Bolch
CollegeCollege of Engineering
MajorBiomedical Engineering
MinorPhysics and Spanish
Research InterestsRadiology and medical physics
Academic AwardsUF Honors College
OrganizationsSpeak Out UF and Women's Student Association
Hobbies and InterestsWriting poetry, yoga, and music

Research Project

Proton Therapy

In this project, Julia will be working on developing slabs of proton tissue equivalent materials (PTEMs) to perform a full dose characterization for proton therapy applications. With these new equivalent human tissues for proton therapy (PT), a more realistic approach of the real dose distribution in patients treated with PT can be achieved. Julia will be working on developing a computational voxel phantom based on CT scan images obtained from the anthropomorphic reference phantom from previous research. Proton irradiation will be conducted and out-of-field organ doses will be measured and compared with calculated organ doses obtained with the computational phantom. Julia hopes to be able to improve the accessibility and affordability of proton therapy for cancer treatment with the improvements and more detailed research continuing to be conducted on the specific benefits and concerns of proton therapy in comparison to traditional radiation therapy.