Lydia Wilson thought the next step in her education would be at a hospital, but a year and a half of observing at cancer clinics in Croatia brought her back to the University.
Wilson, who went to Croatia on a Fulbright research grant to study the high cancer mortality rate in the European country, started her Ph.D. in medical physics this semester and said she hopes to continue her research to minimize radiation treatment risk factors for cancer patients.
“Whenever you treat people with cancer there’s always some amount of risk for late effects,” Wilson said. “There’s a chance the treatment will cause damage to healthy tissue. There’s a chance the patient will end up with a second cancer or cardiac toxicity. So we’re looking at when we do these radiation treatments, not just optimizing how we do these treatments but also looking at how to minimize those risks.”
Working under Wayne Newhauser, medical physics professor and director of medical physics and health physics, in a partnership with the Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center, Wilson focuses on creating models and simulations to reduce the consequences of radiation treatment in a patient’s body.
“Today, our computerized treatment planning systems … mainly focus on eradicating tumors. In the future our research aims to add another important task, minimizing treatment-related side effects in healthy tissues,” Newhauser said. “We are developing and integrating new biphysical models and computer algorithms to create an advanced system that will one day allow doctors to come up with treatment plans that control tumors while sparing healthy tissues, and because each patient is unique, it will do this in a highly personalized way.”
While in Croatia, Wilson said she was curious why a country with a similar number of cancer patients than the U.S., has a much higher cancer mortality rate.
Convinced the answer was more complex than lack of treatment or resources, Wilson observed medical physicists working in cancer research clinics in Zagreb, Croatia.
“Oncologists know everything about the cancer, how it’s expected to develop and how they want to treat it,” Wilson said. “Medical physicists take what the doctor tells them and make sure the treatment goes smoothly. We have to make sure the radiation hits the right place, we make sure the machines are running properly and we keep an eye to see if the treatment is causing the effects we are expecting to see at every point in the treatment.”
Croatia doesn’t offer medical physics programs or licensing procedures for people to become medical physicists, Wilson said. People interested in the career graduate with a physics degree and are trained while on the job by their supervisors.
Wilson said the lack of professional training and licensing makes medical physicists in Croatia be viewed as technicians, rather than healthcare professionals.
Due to their perspective, medical physicists have less input on patient care, which Wilson said is the reason there’s a difference in the cancer mortality rate between Croatia and the U.S.
“Having those education programs and the recognition of being considered health care professionals might help them do their jobs better,” Wilson said.
As part of her Fulbright program, Wilson participated in community outreach by exposing the local community to American customs and the field of medical physics.
Wilson volunteered in libraries and gave talks to high school students to motivate them to pursue careers in medical physics. She also played oboe in a community orchestra, participated in Zumba parties and cooked American desserts for the people in her community.
“My family is culturally Croatian, so it’s always been a dream of mine to learn the language and visit the country,” Wilson said.
Now Wilson is back at the University and preparing proposals for her Ph.D. project — finding ways to minimize the negative effects of radiation on a patient’s body as the next step in cancer treatment.

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Ronni Bourgeois

Fullbright scholar, Lydia Wilson on Feb. 11, 2015, is now attending graduate school at LSU to research cancer.