Richard Amos MSc, CPhys, CSci, FIPEM

Dr. Amos graduated from the University of Birmingham with an MSc in Applied Radiation Physics in 1994, and then went on to complete my clinical training in Medical Physics at the Royal Free Hospital in London. I then worked as a clinical radiotherapy physicist between 1996 and 2002 in both the UK and Canada, apart from a couple of years between 1998 and 2000 when I worked in the Cell & Molecular Biophysics Group at the Gray Laboratory developing and running their charged particle microbeam irradiator, used at that time for biological studies of the radiation bystander effect.

My career in proton beam therapy (PBT) physics started in 2002 when I moved to Loma Linda University Medical Center (LLUMC) in California. LLUMC was the world’s first hospital based PBT facility, treating with protons since 1990. In 2005 I moved to the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center (MDACC) in Houston to play an integral role in commissioning a new PBT facility that commenced treatment with passively scattered proton beams in 2006. In 2008 MDACC became the first PBT facility in the United States, and only the second in the world, to start delivering intensity-modulated proton therapy (IMPT). During my time at MDACC I held a joint appointment at the University of Texas Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at Houston where I developed a PBT Physics module on their MS/PhD degree programme in Medical Physics. In 2013 I returned to the UK to take the position of Operational Lead for PBT Physics at University College London Hospitals (UCLH) NHS Foundation Trust. UCLH, along with the Christie Hospital in Manchester, are developing the first high energy PBT facilities in the UK to jointly serve as a national PBT service. The first patients are due to be treated in 2018