Mirta Dumancic
Bio
Mirta was born and raised in Croatia, where she also studied Physics at the Faculty of Science at the University of Zagreb. Her master’s thesis was in detector development for particle physics. She finished her Ph.D. at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel where she studied the weak-boson production in heavy ion collisions with the LHC detector. After that, she took interest in medical physics and joined the experimental work in breakthrough technology with diffusing alpha-emitters radiation therapy (DaRT) at Ben-Gurion University in Beer Sheva, Israel. She recently joined the Enger lab to further pursue new venues in radiotherapy and radiobiology.
Current Projects
Microdosimetry is a powerful tool to explore and correlate radiobiological effects with fundamental energy depositions on a cellular level. By using the histopathological data from patients to characterize the tumor morphology, we can use currently available track-structure Monte Carlo codes to investigate the energy depositions inside the cell nuclei and their correlations with in-vitro cell survival data and more importantly, the ultimate treatment outcomes in patients. In our studies, we focus on low-energy electron and photon radiation sources in order to further the clinical practice toward patient-specific treatment planning. By using both Geant4 simulation techniques and available experimental tools to measure microdosimetric distributions, we aim to provide a more quantitative understanding of the radiobiological effects for these widely-used sources.