ICTP Welcomes Future Medical Physicists

On the 12th of January, ICTP formally welcomed the fourth class in the program's history to the Medical Physics program, which is run jointly with the University of Trieste. These young, talented physics graduates hailing from developing countries will be training in a mix of theoretical postgraduate classes and clinical work, so that they may be recognized as capable medical physicists anywhere in the world, but especially in their home countries.

The 2017-2018 class of 19 students, four women and fifteen men, includes students from 14 developing countries, ranging from Burundi to Kazakhstan to Nicaragua. They will spend the first twelve months of the program in classes at ICTP, which are taught with assistance from ICTP's UN partner, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The students will then move to hospitals throughout Italy for the clinical portion of their training, supervised by each hospital's medical physics team. There they will spend over six months before completing a dissertation in the last months of the program.

This year's students were officially welcomed by Renato Padovani, co-coordinator of the Masters in Medical Physics program; Luciano Bertocchi, co-coordinator of the Masters in Medical Physics program; Renata Longo, professor of medical physics at the University of Trieste; Sandro Scandolo, senior research scientist at ICTP; and Mr. Jing Zhang, IAEA representative and head of section 1 in the Division for Europe in the Department of Technical Cooperation at IAEA.

Welcome and congratulations to the new MMP students! Photos of the ceremony can be found here.

----Kelsey Calhoun