Doctors who treat cancer must estimate how aggressive a person's cancer is. Based on this, they can select the best treatment to use. If they lack this information, doctors may inadvertently offer too much or too little treatment for the patient's cancer, which can have undesirable effects. New tools that give us better information for these decisions are being quickly developed. Some tools, such as new imaging scans, improve our ability to detect the cancer's location. Others look at the how the genes that makes up a cancer influence its behavior, called gene scores. Even newer strategies look at response to a treatment of a person's own cancer, to guide their next steps, and are called ada...

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Doctors who treat cancer must estimate how aggressive a person's cancer is. Based on this, they can select the best treatment to use. If they lack this information, doctors may inadvertently offer too much or too little treatment for the patient's cancer, which can have undesirable effects. New tools that give us better information for these decisions are being quickly developed. Some tools, such as new imaging scans, improve our ability to detect the cancer's location. Others look at the how the genes that makes up a cancer influence its behavior, called gene scores. Even newer strategies look at response to a treatment of a person's own cancer, to guide their next steps, and are called adaptive therapy. By studying these approaches in clinical research, we may better match patients with their best treatment. As a radiation oncologist, I use high energy X-rays to kill cancer cells, called radiotherapy. I have studied how to use gene scores and new imaging approaches to improve radiotherapy in men with prostate cancer. I now am working with multiple scientists and unique technologies at my hospital to apply adaptive radiotherapy to prostate and bladder cancers. We want to see if this strategy can inform us when adequate treatment has been given, so that we can reduce the side effects treatment. At the same time, as a career mentor and leader of a clinical research office, I aspire to train new clinical researchers and to reduce barriers to their studies, such as cost and time. Our team has expertise in artificial intelligence (AI), a powerful computer technique that can perform repetitive tasks that take up researchers' time. My mentees and I want to work together to use AI methods to automatically check if patients qualify for ongoing studies and to ensure the quality of radiotherapy given on these studies. Through these efforts, I believe we can better personalize cancer treatment and inspire talented young doctors towards careers in clinical research.

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