The American Association of Physicists in Medicine’s Southern California chapter hosted their annual Norm Baily Awards and, for the first time, the MedPhys Slam event at the Cove @ UCI in May. This research communication competition featured students, residents and post-docs who were given 3 minutes to present the impact and importance of their research to a panel of judges.

Kaley Woods, a fourth year biomedical physics graduate student at UCLA, received the Norm Baily Award for her research, “A Double-Focused Sparse Orthogonal Collimator for Small Animal IMRT Using Rectangular Aperture Optimization,” or shaping pre-clinical radiotherapy research in mice with a multi-leaf collimator.

“Eventually, the end goal with this is to make it a commercialized system that we could use with other small animal systems like ours to help pre-clinical research groups to take advantage and improve their research,” said Woods.

She received $1,500 towards her trip to the National MedPhys Slam Competition in Nashville, Tennessee in August, where she will represent the Southern California chapter.

In addition to an overall event winner, the MedPhys Slam portion of the event also awarded students and post-docs with certificates and cash prizes. First places were awarded $300 and second places were awarded $200 in two separate categories.

In the “Student” category:

• First place: Kaley Woods, UCLA Health
“Shaping pre-clinical radiotherapy research”

• Second place: Ryan Neph, UCLA Department of Radiation Oncology
“Fast Photon Beamlet Dose Calculation with Highly Parallel Context Packing GPU-CCCS”

In the “Resident/Post-doc” category:

• First place: Victoria Yu, Ph.D., UCLA Department of Radiation Oncology
“Novel optical whole-body patient surface mapping for robust personalized collision modeling and prevention in external beam radiotherapy”

• Second place: Wenbo Wei, Ph.D., UCI School of Medicine
“Dynamic Contrast Enhanced Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Ocular Melanoma as a Tool to Predict Metastatic Potential”

For more information about the Cove events, click here.