Marcel Van Herk

Overview

Professor of Radiotherapy Physics.  This is a joint post between the University of Manchester and the Christie.  Marcel is responsible for developing a programme of international leading radiotherapy physics research and innovation to deliver direct patient benefits.  The main focus is on accuracy of radiotherapy including target volume definition, treatment planning, image guidance and treatment follow-up.

Work Stream 4 for NCRI Clinical and Translational Radiotherapy Research (CTRad) Working Group

Biography

Professor Marcel van Herk joined the University of Manchester on the 1st of April 2015 as new chair in radiotherapy physics.  He is currently setting up a research group focussing on improving the accuracy of radiotherapy. As his work heavily involves implementation of research into clinical practice, he has an honorary appointment at the Christie.

He has been active in radiotherapy and worked at the Netherlands Cancer Institute (NKI) since 1982.  As a medical physics student he started on the development of a liquid ionization imaging device that later became the Varian PortalVision system for electronic portal imaging.  During his PhD at the NKI, the detector was further developed and commercialized and the focus of the work shifted to image processing, correction procedures and margins.  Starting during a Postdoc at Harvard Medical School, USA in 1992, his work incorporated 3D image processing, first CT-MR image registration for treatment planning, later measuring organ motion and other uncertainties in radiotherapy such as delineation variability.  Much of this work has been integrated in the Elekta Synergy cone-beam CT image guidance system developed jointly in a consortium with Elekta and David Jaffray.  For the past 10 years, he also held a part-time teaching role as a Professor at the University of Amsterdam working amongst others at the integration of microscopic optical imaging into radiotherapy treatment planning.

His goal is to do research to improve the clinical practice of radiotherapy in Christie, UK and the world.  To achieve this he feels we need to perform first class research, speedy clinical implementation and collaborate with industry to bring our ideas to the market. 

Marcel has (co-) authored more than 190 papers in peer reviewed journals.