Neelam Tyagi, PhD
Dr. Tyagi is an associate attending physicist in the Department of Medical Physics. Since joining Memorial Sloan Kettering in 2013, her clinical and research efforts have been focused on building a clinical and academic program on the application of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in radiation oncology. Dr. Tyagi has been actively involved in developing radiotherapy simulation workflows for combined MR-CT and MR-only simulation as well as in the use of anatomical and functional MRI as biomarkers for assessing response to therapy. Their efforts have resulted in MSK being the first institution to clinically implement MR-only simulation for prostate radiotherapy, which is recognized internationally as being on the forefront of MR applications in radiotherapy. Dr. Tyagi leads the clinical program in MR-guided adaptive radiotherapy on the Elekta 1.5T Unity MR-linac system, which was put into clinical use in early 2020.
Dr. Tyagi received her PhD from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2006, and she was board certified in therapeutic medical physics by the American Board of Radiology in 2010. Dr. Tyagi is a member of various national and international task groups and working groups that continue to work towards developing guidelines and recommendations, as well as identifying gaps and unmet needs, on the use of MRI in radiation oncology.
Percy Lee, M.D.
Dr. Lee is Professor and Section Chief of the Thoracic Radiation Oncology Section in the Department of Radiation Oncology at The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. Before joining MD Anderson, Dr. Lee was Professor and Vice Chair of Education for the Department of Radiation Oncology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. At UCLA, he served as Chief of Thoracic Radiation Oncology, Residency Training Program Director, and Director of the Stereotactic Body Radiation Therapy Program. Dr. Lee has an international reputation in the treatment of thoracic malignancies. He has research interests in applying novel technologies such as MRI-guided radiation therapy in the clinic. He led the clinical implementation of MRI-guided radiation therapy program at UCLA as the 3 rd site in the world with this innovation. In addition, he is a clinical trialist who is interested in combining novel radiation therapy approaches with new drugs in order to achieve improved outcomes in thoracic malignancies. He has served on various leadership roles within national organizations such as ASTRO, ABR, ARS, and ACR.
Clinical Interests
- Non-small cell lung cancer
- Small cell lung cancer
- Thymoma
- Malignant Mesothelioma
- Esophageal cancer
- Oligometastatic disease
- Immunotherapy with radiotherapy
- MRI-guided radiotherapy
- Stereotactic body radiation therapy
- Image-guided radiotherapy
- Motion management in thoracic radiotherapy
Richard Speight
Dr. Richard Speight works as a MPE in the radiotherapy imaging physics team at the Leeds Cancer Centre. His position is funded by Cancer Research UK (ARTNET) and has research interests involving the role of MRI in radiotherapy. This includes image registration between MRI and CT (a topic he has authored a chapter on in a Springer text book entitled “MRI for Radiotherapy – planning, delivery and response assessment”) and MRI-only radiotherapy (a topic he is currently co-supervising 2 PhD students on). He chaired an IPEM working group entitled “MR simulation for external beam RT” and as a part of the group he was involved with the auditing the current landscape of MRI in radiotherapy in 10 countries as well as producing guidelines on how to safely implement MR simulation for radiotherapy.
2022 AUS MRinRT 