Current XCITE Lab members
Name | Position | Project |
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Magdalena Bazalova-Carter | Associate Professor | All of them :) |
Pierre-Antoine Rodesch | Postdoctoral fellow | CT imaging with photon-counting detectors |
Nolan Esplen | PhD candidate | FLASH/SFRT |
Devon Richtsmeier | PhD candidate | Gold nanoparticle drug delivery and spectral imaging |
Jericho O'Connell | PhD student | MV CBCT |
Alex Hart | PhD student | Scintillators and FLASH with x-ray tube |
Teaghan O'Briain | MSc student | ML for 4D PET |
Laszlo Zalavari | Certificate student | Segmentation in photon-counting x-ray images |
Nathan Clements | Co-op student | Spatially-fractionated radiotherapy |
Josephine Brewster | USRA student | Dose calculations with kilovoltage beams |
Courage Mahuvava | Volunteer | Dose calculations for small animal radiotherapy |
Jonathan Eby | Volunteer | Table-top FLASH system |
Kevin Murphy | Volunteer | Spectral CT imaging |

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Magdalena Bazalova-Carter, PhD, DABR Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Medical Physics (Tier 2)
Magdalena received her BSc in Physical Engineering at the Czech Technical University in Prague in 2003 and her PhD in Medical
Physics at McGill University in 2008. In 2009, she started her postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University and three years later she was
promoted to an Instructor at the same institution. Apart from advancing her academic career, Magdalena enjoyed working at the Stanford
Hospital as a part-time clinical medical physicist. Magdalena joined the Department of Physics and Astronomy as an Assistant Professor
in July of 2015. Her CV can be downloaded here.
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Pierre-Antoine Rodesch, PhD Postdoctoral fellow
Pierre-Antoine [/pjeʁãtwan/] is French, he received his BSc in mechanical engineering in Paris in 2012 in Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées. He then slowly slipped towards medical imaging by firstly getting a MSc in biomechanics in 2014. He then moved to the French Alps to do a PhD on spectral CT reconstruction with photon-counting detectors in CEA Léti. From 2018 to 2020, he worked in the CREATIS laboratory in Lyon on the SPCCT, a large field of view spectral CT prototype, equipped with photon-counting detectors.
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Nolan Esplen, BSc PhD candidate
Nolan received his BSc in Physics and Astronomy at UVic in 2014. Having long been interested in Medical Physics, he now hopes to
pursue a Masters degree in the field. As an advocate for computing in science, Nolan is excited to be currently working on Monte
Carlo simulations relating to XFCT imaging. In the future, he hopes to further engage in research that allows for a blending of
computational and experimental methods, with a focus on affecting positive change in peoples lives. |
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Devon Richtsmeier PhD candidate
Devon is from Boise, Idaho and received his BSc in Physics from Boise State University in 2018. As an undergraduate, in addition to his coursework, Devon worked on research in Biophysics investigating the pore-forming protein lysenin. In the course of that research he also became interested Medical Physics and began investigating it more fully before finally deciding to pursue a degree in it. Devon began his MSc in Medical Physics at UVic in September 2018 and is also a part of the CREATE PoND Program. He is working on using gold nanoparticles in conjunction with XFCT.
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Jericho O'Connell PhD student
Jericho is set to receive a BSc in Physics from UVic in the near future. During his time at the beautiful University of Victoria Jericho has had the opportunity to work in various co-op positions. These co-ops include work in dual energy CT
at the Institute of Cancer Research in London, as well as building virtual research environments for the Computational Astrophysics group at UVic. His project this summer builds on his dual energy CT experience by analyzing multi-energy
planar imaging for poultry quality assurance, which he swears has something to do with medical physics.
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Alex Hart PhD student
Alex received his BSc in Applied Physics from Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington in 2015. Shortly after, he began his career in medical physics as an Applied Physics Technologist with Northwest Medical Physics Center before moving to Canada for graduate school. Alex earned his MSc in Medical Physics from the University of Victoria in early 2021 while a member of the UBC-based Qurit lab. His masters work focused on the development of new clinical protocols for oncological FDG PET/CT imaging. As a PhD student, Alex is excited to contribute to the rapidly developing field of FLASH radiotherapy.
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Teaghan O'Briain MSc student
Teaghan is currently in his final year of his BSc in Physics at UVic. Over the past few years, he has worked on several research projects involving machine learning and its application to both astronomy and medical research. His current project involves developing a network that is able to synthetically modify CT scans by imprinting “realistic” cancerous lesions, which can then be used for assessing new treatment methods.
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Laszlo Zalavari Certificate student
Laszlo is originally from Budapest, Hungary. I moved to England to complete an IB program, after which he completed my BSc at the University of Sussex. Having always been drawn to particle physics, his next move was to earn an MSc in Quantum Fields and Fundamental Forces from Imperial College London. Following this program there was still enough spark in him to continue in the field and so Laszlo moved to Hamilton, Ontario to complete a PhD in Theoretical Particle Physics. Then, due to some personal matters he moved to Victoria with his wife, where he is currently enrolled in the CAMPEP approved Graduate Certificate Program in Medical Physics of UVic, in the hope of becoming a clinical medical physicist.
Along the way he was lucky to meet some of the nicest people he have ever met, and has benefited from the generosity of many of them, including Dr. Bazalova-Carter who was kind enough to give him a research project that focuses on applying machine learning techniques to classify contaminated poultry on production lines using multi-energy bin x-ray imaging.
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Nathan Clements Co-op student Nathan is from Summerland, BC and will be entering fourth-year of his BSc in Physics September at UVic. He is very excited to join the XCITE Lab for an NSERC USRA position. He will be experimenting with the AmpTek X-123CdTe detector doing phantom scans and hopefully working up to a biological sample. In his free time, he likes going to the gym and playing basketball and volleyball. |
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Josephine Brewster USRA student
Josephine is a UVic undergraduate student from Kamloops, BC, studying mathematics and physics. She just finished her second year and this is her first co-op term as well as her first time holding an NSERC USRA. She is interested in many aspects of physics and is looking forward to trying something new.
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Courage Mahuvava Volunteer
Courage is from Zvishavane, a small town in the Midlands province of Zimbabwe. Under the Medical Research Council of South Africa, Courage spent the past six years as a Medical Physics researcher in a clinical radiation oncology environment, where he worked on several High-Energy Advanced Radiation Dosimetry (HARD) flagship projects; ranging from prototype beta testing of the IQM transmission detector to online treatment verification as well as pre-treatment quality assurance (QA) in combination with EGSnrc Monte Carlo (MC) dose calculations.
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Jonathan Eby Volunteer
Jonathan Eby is a 4th year UVic biomedical engineering student. Jon has worked in a variety of fields, from the study of nano-apertures to medical device design.
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Kevin Murphy Volunteer
Kevin is working on an undergraduate degree in Physics & Astronomy at the
University of Victoria. He spent a summer working in Eureka Nunavut with
PEARL research lab and looks forward to continuing to pursue his passion for
a greater understand of the universe and our place in it.
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Former XCITE Lab members
Name | Next or current position | Project |
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Joanna Nguyen, PhD | Researcher at General Electric | Food inspection with photon-counting detectors |
Daniel Cecchi | MSc student at U of Calgary | Scintillators for FLASH therapy |
Ellie Badun | Chillin' | Web-based dose viewer VICTORIA |
Chelsea Dunning, PhD | Postdoctoral fellow at Mayo Clinic | Novel x-ray imaging modalities (PhD) |
Dylan Breitkreutz, PhD | Resident at Stanford University | Kilovoltage x-ray beam arc therapy (PhD) |
Chris Johnstone, PhD | Resident at University of Toronto | Small animal radiotherapy (PhD) |
Spencer Robinson | BSc student at UVic | Spectral CT imaging, EBT3 film response |
Eisa Alyaqoub | BSc student at University of Madison (EE) | 3D printing for small animal radiotherapy |
Clay Lindsay | PhD student at UVic | Combined kV/MC imaging with a high-DQE MV detector |
Spencer Bialek | PhD student at UVic (Astronomy) | Software development for microCT image analysis |
Henry Baxter | BSc student at UVic (CS) | Visualization of TrueBeam treatment trajectories Kilovoltage x-ray beam arc therapy |
Lila Chergui | MSc student at Perimeter Institute (Theory) | Microbeam radiotherapy |
Aaron Bannister | MSc student at UVic (Medical Physics) | Gel dosimetry in the presence of metals |