Accelerator techniques play an important role in the study of radiation effects in biological cells and provide important information on DNA damage and response that can potentially be translated to clinical trials and improved health outcomes for radiotherapy. With recent developments in high resolution ion beam and synchrotron-based X-ray microscopy imaging and sub-cellular targeting techniques, there is an opportunity to further develop, disseminate and promote the use of these techniques to better understand fundamental problems in radiobiology and cancer treatment.
The areas of investigation include the study of cell response to targeted sub cellular irradiation, uptake of nanoparticles for radio sensitization aided by high resolution imaging and irradiation, development of sample preparation protocols for live and fixed cell samples and the development of data acquisition systems, novel radiation detection systems based on quantum sensing, electronics and software tools for imaging and irradiation analysis at accelerator beamlines.