Dr. Alanah Bergman
Dr. Alanah Bergman, FCCPM is a Senior Medical Physicist, working at the Department of Radiation Therapy, BC Cancer-Vancouver. She has a Clinical Assistant Professor appointment at the University of British Columbia’s Faculty of Medicine (Division of Radiation Oncology and Developmental Radiotherapeutics), as well as Honorary Lecturer status at the Faculty of Science (Department of Physics and Astronomy). She is an active member of both the clinical and academic teams at BC Cancer. Alanah received an MSc from the McGill University Medical Radiation Physics program (1997) and a PhD in physics from UBC (2007).
Research Areas
SABR: Dr. Bergman’s research interests include the implementation and assessment of outcomes for Stereotactic ABlative Radiotherapy (SABR).
Motion Management: The influence of physiological motion on the accurate delivery of these types of treatments is a challenge. She is leading the real-time dynamic tumour tracking clinical team and is actively researching the feasibility of tracking radiation treatments to the liver and lung using underutilized soft-tissue anatomical surrogates.
Monte Carlo: She is also active with the Monte Carlo simulation team, working to simulate new medical linear accelerator technology available at BC Cancer.
Radiation Retreatments: Dr. Bergman has a keen interest in the area of radiation retreatment to patients who return for multiple courses of therapy. Learning about how to add radiation doses that have different radiobiological impacts for patients that may also have have gross body shape/size/position changes is an exciting challenge.
“Wave Arc” Trajectories for Radiotherapy: Dr. Bergman is also working with technology that can deliver radiation beams offering simultaneous rotations about two axes during continuous arc deliveries. Determining the most effective application of this advanced capability is super interesting.
Appointments and Affiliations
Graduate supervisor - UBC Department of Physics and Astronomy
Clinical assistant professor - UBC Department of Surgery
Fellow - Canadian College of Physicists in Medicine (CCPM)
Supervision
Previous
Maryam Rostamzadeh (PhD)