Hello, I am Beatriz Sánchez. I am a physicist with a PhD in Medical Physics and talking to you
from Chile. I'm currently working as an associate professor at the Institute of Physics
at the Pontificial Catholic University Chile.
Today, I have to talk about what is my daily work as a medical physics in my case in the university.
Well, as I held an academic position, I do a lot of lecturing to pre and postgraduate students.
I also have to supervise their research when they are doing their thesis in our medical physics
master program. I also do my own research with other colleagues from the institute or colleagues
from abroad, but also how to spend some time writing projects to finance our research. But
also I have to do outreach giving lectures to students at schools for example and also sometimes
I have to record videos to talk about what is my daily life as a medical physicist. Well,
in particular my research consists of modeling the doses that a patient under radiotherapy
treatment receives outside the treatment field. These doses are relatively low but they can lead
to second cancer several years later. We are doing modeling but also we need to test if those models
are working correctly and for that we should test those models against experimental data.
How can I measure the dose received by patients under radiotherapy treatment? Well, I can use
very tiny detectors like small crystals of the order of a millimeter that I can put inside a
different geometries, simulated a human being. Sometimes these geometries are very, very simple
like a cube, filled of water, but sometimes we are as lucky as having something like Chris.
Chris is a antropomorphical phantom and inside him we can find all the complexity
of the structures and geometries that we can find in a real human being. So we can place inside him
these small tiny detectors to measure the dose outside the treatment fields.
I can show you for example how Chris looks inside. I've taken part of the head of Chris
and inside, I can see the structure simulating the bones and even the brain. Those numbers
means or can be used as a reference for the dosimeters I will plain inside Chris.
Now, I want to tell you about what are the things that I do like most in my job. And probably,
the most important one is thinking that what I do can have an impact on a cancer
patient's care but I also really enjoy it when I see my students enchanted with what they are
learning or investigating, or when I think on their progression since they enter in our master
program and now they are working as professionals in radiotherapy centers or doing their PhD studies
or working at the industry. I also enjoy when I finish my research and I have to write a paper to
communicate to the Medical Physics community our results. But all in all, I cannot think
on a single day in which I get bored what I am doing in my daily life as a medical physicist.
One of them is to manage to deliver a good lecture and when you get that, you really feels it. That's
really important. But also, another challenge is to be able to recover from the frustration
that it happens when you see that your research is moving slowly than you really thought or planned
at the beginning. Also, it is difficult when after a lot of work, you get a result which is different
from what your intuition as a physicist you get. Well, I hope you have enjoyed this small video
recording to celebrate the Virtual International Day of Medical Physics. Bye from Chile!