2024-2025 Awards

There’s a lot to celebrate in the Department of Medical Physics! Congratulations to everyone for their hard work and recognition as we close out 2025.

Fellow – American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE)

• Brad Christian, PhD
• Oliver Wieben, PhD

Fellow – International Society Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM)

• Diego Hernando, PhD

Fellow – American Brachytherapy Society

• Larry DeWerd, PhD

Distinguished Investigator Award – The Academy for Radiology & Biomedical Imaging Research

• Diego Hernando, PhD
• Kevin Johnson, PhD

Mentoring Award –  2025 American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) Professional Impact Awards

• Weibo Cai, PhD

North American Chinese Medical Physics Association Hall of Fame

• Guang-Hong Chen, PhD

Recognizing research and teaching excellence, these faculty were recipients of awards for their contributions to the university.

• Andrew Alexander, PhD
  Kellett Mid-Career Award
• Kevin Eliceiri, PhD
  Open Awards Hall of Fame, recognizing campus members driving open research practices
• Marina Emborg, MD, PhD
  Steenbock Professorship in Behavioral and Neural Sciences
• Jonathan Engle, PhD
  H.I. Romnes Faculty Fellowship – 2025
• Reinier Hernandez, PhD
  2024 Early Career Innovator Awards
  SPORE Award
  WARF Therapeutic Award
• Diego Hernando, PhD
  Vilas Mid-Career Award
• Oliver Wieben, PhD
  Vilas Mid-Career Award

December 2025

• Marina Emborg, PhD, received the 2025 Group on Women in Medicine and Science (GWIMS) Impact Award.
• Victor Santoro Fernandes, PhD, was selected as a Termeer Scholar in the 2025 Scholar’s Program.

November 2025

• The National Academy of Inventor’s (NAI) recent webinar, held on October 14th, was in celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month and featured faculty members Reinier Hernandez, PhD, and Diego Hernando, PhD.
• Marty Pagel, PhD, and his colleague, Sanhita Sinharay in Bangalore, India were selected for a 2025 Global Oncology pilot award on their proposal, Improving Breast Cancer Diagnoses in India using Optoacoustic Imaging. 
• Larry DeWerd, PhD, was recognized as a founder of the Northwest chapter of the AAPM at the 50th chapter anniversary. 

October 2025

• Larry DeWerd, PhD, was featured in the 2025 2nd quarter edition of the Top 100 Registry publication. The Top 100 Registry is the leading publisher of professional biographies in the world. 
• Grace Minesinger (PhD Candidate), was awarded 2nd place at the flash talk competition for UWCCC Trainee Symposium.
• The UW Accredited Dosimetry Calibration Laboratory (UWADCL) works with AAPM’s Equipment Donation Program to calibrate physics equipment at no charge. This equipment is donated to facilities in countries that do not have enough resources to purchase their own. 

September 2025

• Sean Jollota (PhD Candidate), received a blue ribbon on his poster submission at AAPM titled: Verification of RPT Dose Calculation Platforms from Absolute Absorbed Dose Measurement of 225 Ac
• Emeritus Professor Bruce Thomadsen was awarded the 2025 Rajinder Dhada Safety Award for lifetime achievement in safety from the Indo-American Society for Medical Physics. 
• Emeritus Professor RJ Nickles received the Johann Gadolin Award at the Turku 2025 PET Conference to commemorate the 50 years of collaboration between the UW and the Abo Akademi / Turku University.
• Hartmuth Kolb, PhD, was featured in the Summer 2025 issue of OnWisconsin, a UW—Madison Alumni magazine.
• Marina Emborg, MD, PhD, was inducted into Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Honor Society. 

August 2025

• Malick Idrissou, PhD, was awarded:
  DOD PCRP Early Investigator Award: Combining 225Ac-PSMA and BRD4 disruption to overcome resistance in advanced prostate cancer (Primary Mentor: Reinier Hernandez)
  First Place Poster Award at the 2025 Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging (SNMMI) annual meeting. 
• Joey Schulz and Ohyun Kwon (PhD Candidates), were the recipients of the 16th annual Standard Imaging Travel Award for the AAPM Annual Meeting.
• Joey Schulz (PhD Candidate), was selected as a recipient of the 2025 AAPM/RSNA Doctoral and Masters Graduate Fellowship
• Laura Castañeda Martinez (PhD Candidate), received the AAPM Hispanic and Latin-X Medical Physics Trainee Travel Award Laura also received the Best in Physics: Ultrasound distinction at the AAPM Annual Meeting. The abstract featured a new phantom made by Cristel Baiu, lab manager of the Phantom Lab.  
• Tyler Bradshaw, PhD, was promoted to Associate Professor (CHS). 
• Tim Szczykutowicz, PhD, was promoted to Professor (CHS). 
• The Morgridge Institute hosted the 19th annual Summer Science Camp. This camp is made possible in part, by Ed and Sondra Jackson through their generous support of the program. Morgridge will host 75 students and 13 teachers across 14 different schools this summer. 

June 2025

• Malick Idrissou, PhD, a postdoc in Reinier Hernandez’s Advanced Radiotheranostics Lab, was notified of funding support for a Prostate Cancer Research Program (PCRP) Early Investigator Research Award
• A discovery (ART-101, a radiopharmaceutical for prostate cancer) made by the Advanced Radiotheranostics Lab moved towards clinical trials in a collaboration between WARF and Archeus Technologies.

May 2025

• Emeline Hanna (PhD Candidate) received a Graduate Fellowship from the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the proposed area of study, Biomedical Engineering. 

March 2025

• Grace Minesinger (PhD Candidate), won 2nd place in the oral poster presentation competition at the SPIE Medical Imaging conference in San Deigo, CA. Title: Swine liver segmentation for FEM-based image fusion in CBCT guided histotripsy

February 2025

• Ivan Rosado-Mendez, PhD, was granted a Fall Research Competition award by the OVCR for his research: Super-resolution ultrasound imaging of cervical microvasculature for assessing the risk of preterm birth.

December 2024

• Oliver Wieben, PhD, organized the  Society for Magnetic Resonance Angiography (SMRA) annual conference in Chile.
• NCC AAPM meeting was held at the Memorial Union in November. The Early Career Investigator Competition winners: Nicholas Summerfield (1st), Aubrey Parks (2nd), Jeremy Hallett (3rd).
• PhD Student Linying Zhan received the RSNA Trainee Research Prize for her work,  Performance Evaluation in Photon Counting CT (PCD-CT): Measuring DQE and Detector Dead Time Using an Image-Based Framework

November 2024

• The UW LAIR Team was awarded 1st place in Task 2 at the MICAAI HNTS-MRG 2024 Grand Challenge. Challenge focused on H&N tumor volume segmentation using MRI for pre- & mid-radiotherapy images. 
• Aria Salyapongse (PhD Candidate) –  received the Three Pearls award at the annual Society for Advanced Body Imaging (SABI) meeting. For Explanation of Non-physical Values on Spectral Material Density Maps in CT. 
• PhD Candidates Ken Gregg, Chase Ruff, and Dr. Carri Glide-Hurst were named Editor’s Choice for AAPM’s October edition. Their work was featured as the cover image for the issue. 

October 2024

• Euitaek Yang, PhD – poster award at the World Molecular Imaging Conference Title: Oxygen Saturation-Dynamic Contrast Enhanced Multi-Spectral Optoacoustic Tomography for Assessing Hypoxia and Vascular Perfusion in Wound Healing.
• Discovery to Product (D2P) SEED program &  matching grant from the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation. Awardees include Drs. Scott Reeder,  Diego Hernando, Wally Block, Andrew Alexander.

September 2024

• Brian Pogue PhD, – elected to  SPIE Board of Directors
• Tommy Stasko, (PhD candidate) accepted the George Starkschall Award of Excellence for an Outstanding Radiation Physics Article at this year’s AAPM conference
• Yadira Medina (PhD candidate) received third place award at the SNMMI A
• Nicholas Summerfield, Alexandra Christensen & Lisette LeMerise (PhD Candidates) – poster session winners at the  Emerging Leaders Symposium.

August 2024

• Brad Christian, PhD, was appointed as Chair of the Radioactive Drug Research Committee (RDRC).
• Xin Tie and Yuhao Yan (PhD Candidates)2024 AAPM Standard Imaging Travel Award winners  
• Yinsheng Li, Xin Tie, Ke Li, Ran Zhang, Zhihua Qi, Adam Budde, Thomas M. Grist, and Guang-Hong Chen.  – AAPM Moses and Sylvia Greenfield Award for best paper in Medical Physics,  “A quality-checked and physics-constrained deep learning method to estimate material basis images from single-kV contrast-enhanced chest CT scans.”
• Linying Zhan (PhD Candidate), was a finalist of the John R Cameron Early Career Symposium. 
• Benjamin Awad (mentor J. Slagowski) AAPM DREAM Summer Fellow