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discovered_02_2015

discovered 02.15 PANORAMA Off to the Falling Walls Conference with the TU In his doctoral thesis at the HZDR and the cfaed, the "Center for Advancing Electronics" of the TU Dresden, Dipjyoti Deb deals with fabrication and characterization of silicon nano- wires. Establishing new contacts is also a task that he takes on with great gusto in the real world. In this vein, he is currently working on putting together a joint master program between the TU Dresden and the University College Cork in Ireland. "The idea for the project arose during a research trip to Cork," says the physicist, whom everyone simply calls DJ. At the "Falling Walls Conference" on November 8 – 9, 2015, in Berlin he also got the chance to prove that communication is another of his strengths. He had appeared as the international ambassador of the TU Dresden at previous events. The university itself was recognized for its ALUMNI work by the "Action Alliance for Research Marketing" conceived by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) and invited to the conference for this reason. So the nomination of this smart doctoral candidate was an obvious choice. "That's how the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation ended up paying my ticket," DJ says, pleased about the role as specialist for ALUMNI questions in Germany bestowed upon him. At the conference Dipjyoti Deb invited several conversation partners to Dresden, but also had a lot of questions to answer on the current atmosphere in the city and on Pegida: "I had some very intense discussions with Naila Kabeer, a writer and researcher at the London School of Economics, about gender issues in science and with French sociologist Nilüfer Göle, who promised to visit the TU Dresden if I organize a program for her." He also spoke with physics Nobel Prize winner Wolfgang Ketterle as well as science journalist Ranga Yogeshwar and leading representatives from industry and politics. www.falling-walls.com www.cfaed.tu-dresden.de 1st Poster Prize for Sonja Schellhammer Doctoral candidates from the clinically oriented HZDR Institute of Radiooncology took part in the central doctoral seminar of the HZDR for the first time. The meeting took place in the Ore Mountains at the beginning of November 2015, and was a great success. Medical physicist Sonja Schellhammer won first place for the best poster presentation. What's special about this? She'd only been working on her research topic for one month then. At the Institute of Radiooncology and under the guidance of the Dutch researcher Aswin Hoffmann, Sonja Schellhammer is investigating the physical aspects of therapeutic ion beams inside a strong magnetic field of a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) device, in particular the deflection of the beam by the Lorentz force. Electrically charged particles – the ions – play an increasingly important role in cancer therapy. The lightest ion is a proton. It is comprised of a hydrogen atom from which an electron was extracted. "Unlike conventional radiation therapy with high-energy X-rays, the use of protons for cancer therapy offers a highly conformal dose profile," Schellhammer explains. This means that the protons will give off very little energy as they make their way through the patient's body - and thus cause minimal damage to healthy tissue. At the spot where they come to rest, however, the particles will deposit all of their remaining energy as ionizing dose, hence sparing the tissue behind the tumor. This would therefore make it possible to further reduce side- effects and even apply higher radiation doses to the tumorous tissue. However, proton therapy is very sensitive to organ motion and tissue deformations originating from breathing, digestion, or a heartbeat. "My goal is to investigate the feasibility of integrating real-time MRI into proton therapy so that anatomical changes during irradiation can be registered and compensated for," says the young doctoral candidate. She is therefore working on backing up her theoretical model for the deflection of proton beams in MRI magnetic fields with measurements. The master's program she graduated from at the OncoRay National Center for Radiation Research in Oncology in Dresden has given her the perfect foundation for this. www.oncoray.de Dipjyoti Deb is dedicated to promoting international collaboration inside and outside of the lab. Photo: cfaed | Jürgen Lösel

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