Gabriel O Sawakuchi

He is a board-certified medical physicist and Associate Professor (with tenure) in the Department of Radiation Physics at MD Anderson. He is also a regular faculty member of the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, The University of Texas, Houston and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Biosciences at Rice University. As the gastrointestinal-physics service chief in the Department of Radiation Physics, he leads a team of eight PhD level board certified medical physics faculty members who oversees the treatment of over 1,000 patients per year. He oversees all clinical physics aspects of the gastrointestinal radiotherapy program at MD Anderson. He also leads the intra-operative radiation therapy program (IORT) at MD Anderson which treats rectal, and head and neck cancers using high-dose rate (HDR) afterloading units to deliver radiation in the operating room. His research is at the interface of radiobiology, DNA repair, and immunology and currently focuses on understanding how radiation-induced DNA damage, and repair can be leveraged to radiosensitize tumors and activate the immune system to combat cancer. His laboratory studies how different forms of clinical radiation including photons, protons, carbon ions and alpha particles modulate oxidative stress, DNA damage, DNA repair and immune activation. (Fonte: Currículo Lattes)