Assistant Professor of Radiation Oncology Harvard Medical School

Investigator, Asst Prof (M) RadOnc MGH PaganettiLab, Mass General Research Institute

PhD Universidad de Sevilla 2020

carbon ion therapy; monte carlo modeling; proton beam therapy; radiation therapy physics; radiobiology; radioembolization; radiopharmaceutical therapies; radiotherapy; track structure monte carlo

I am the Director of Radiopharmaceutical Dosimetry at the Center for Nuclear Medicine Research and Theranostic Sciences (CNMTS) of the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School, and the head of the Bertolet Lab (shortened as b-lab, website: https://bertoletlab.mgh.harvard.edu). I am also an Associate Director of the Radiation Biology Program at MGH Radiation Oncology. My lab's research focuses on computational techniques and modeling for the use of radiation in cancer care, with a strong emphasis on theranostics and radiopharmaceutical therapies (RPT). We cover aspects ranging from the fundamental effects of different types of radiation in biological systems to patient-specific dosimetry in the pursuit of optimizing the delivery of radiation-based cancer treatments. Our work is at the intersection of computational mathematics, radiation physics, imaging physics, and radiation biology. I am funded by the NIH/NCI, having received an R00 grant to study microdosimetry, DNA damage, and repair in the exposure of neuroblastoma cells to alpha particle RPT (R00 CA267560). I am the PI of a subcontract from the University of Pennsylvania on an R01 grant (R01 CA278882) to study in vitro effects of alpha particle RPT on ovarian cancer cells. I am also the PI of an R21 grant focused on developing a new reconstruction algorithm for SPECT scans based on reverse physics and the Monte Carlo method, which will aid in improving the quality of images for dosimetry in RPT. 

My lab currently has four postdoctoral fellows working on the projects described above and other open interests in our group, as well as a first-year resident in Medical Physics, Mislav Bobic, carrying out his research project in my lab. My first postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Carlos Huesa-Berral, works on improving responses of hepatic cancer patients undergoing transarterial radioembolization with microspheres labeled with Yttrium-90 (Y-90), as I was the recipient of the Loeffler Team Science Pilot Grant at the Department of Radiation Oncology of MGH to perform these studies. His work has received the Best-In-Physics award from the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM) and a Travel Award from the Radiation Research Society (RRS). Victor V. Onecha, another postdoctoral fellow in my lab, is working on developing new Monte Carlo methods for SPECT reconstruction and RPT dosimetry. Despite having started in our lab just a few months ago, he has presented this work at regional conferences and has submitted an article for publication. José Antonio Lopez-Valverde is another promising postdoc in our lab, working on modeling the mechanism of action of radiosensitizer nanoparticles used in radiation therapy. Besides my own publications, I have served as guest editor in special issues for the journals Physics in Medicine and Biology, Frontiers in Physics, and Nanotechnology. Finally, Debangana Mukhopadhyay just joined my laboratory as a postdoctoral fellow to work on a project to develop a digital twin for pediatric tumors.

I co-supervise the Ph.D. programs of Daniel Suarez-Garcia, a student from the University of Sevilla in Spain. Additionally, we host 6-8 visiting students per year at the b-lab. One of our recent students, Louis Kunz, received special recognition for our work on a computational tumor model, AMBER, at the conferences of the RRS and the Society of Mathematical Biology (SMB). I have been nominated two years in a row for the Rising Mentor Award that the Center for Faculty Development at MGH awards to young mentors after letters written by my mentees. I have been selected for two years in a row as one of the few mentors for the AAPM Summer School program. I have also been selected as the Mentor for the MGH Physics Diversity Summer Program twice, supervising Marcus Lindsey in 2022 and Zakiya Williams in 2024. Additionally, I have been also a mentor for one undergraduate and one high-school student within the Dana Farber/Harvard Cancer Center CURE Mentorship program in 2024.

I am a fellow of the Andrew L. Warshaw Institute for Pancreatic Cancer Research, for which I developed a project to investigate the applicability of alpha-particle RPT to the treatment of pancreatic adenocarcinoma. The National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements (NCRP) has just granted me the with the 2025 John D. Boyle Young Investigator Award. The RRS awarded me the prestigious Jack Fowler award in 2022 in recognition of my contributions to the fields of radiation oncology, medical physics, and radiobiology. I have also been selected as one of the ‘One to Watch’ rising professionals by the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging (SNMMI) in 2023. I have been invited to the Emerging Leaders of Academic Medical Physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2024. To date, I have been invited to give more than ten seminars internationally in prestigious institutions such as the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre in Toronto, Canada, the Imperial College in London, UK, the University of Wollongong in Australia, or the Spanish National Cancer Research Center in Madrid, Spain. I have delivered invited talks and seminars at several top national institutions, such as Johns Hopkins University and the Oak Ridge National Lab.

My background includes research in the microdosimetry and biophysics of proton and particle therapy, having published on this topic around 15 articles as the first author in the most prestigious journals in the Medical Physics field. The University of Sevilla granted my Ph.D. thesis an Extraordinary Doctorate Award. I also completed a certified clinical program for Medical Physics in Spain between 2015 and 2018, including clinical duties in radiation therapy, nuclear medicine, radiodiagnostics, and radiation protection. My dual clinical and academic training allows me to tackle problems in radiation-based oncology from a broad and rounded perspective.