Isabella Duarte (PhD’20) was recently awarded the Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award Individual Predoctoral Fellowship to Promote Diversity in Health-Related Research (F31 Fellowship) by the NIH, under the mentorship of her co-advisors Drs. Fang-Fang Yin and Jing Cai. This fellowship enables pre-doctoral students to develop into productive, independent researchers, while also aiming to enhance diversity in the health-related research workforce. During this two-year fellowship, Isabella will be working on a project titled ‘Lung Ventilation Mapping Based on Biomechanical Motion Modeling for Radiation Therapy’, which seeks to develop and evaluate a highly efficient and robust biomechanically-based hybrid deformable image registration method for lung ventilation applications. Radiation-induced pulmonary toxicity poses a serious challenge and limiting factor in delivering a sufficient amount of dose to eradicate thoracic tumors without compromising lung function. Once fully developed and validated, this method can potentially be used for functional-based treatment planning and adaptive radiotherapy to improve the outcome of lung cancer treatments by minimizing dose deposition to functional lung tissue.
