Message from Our Chair

Dear Alumni, 

Welcome to the Fall 2025 issue of The Beam – our department’s quarterly e-newsletter! It was great seeing many of you at our faculty and alumni reception September 29th at the Proton Therapy site which aligned with the ASTRO conference in San Francisco. We will have photos in our next quarterly issue.

The fall season is well underway! Over the last several months our department leadership and staff have focused on building community and engagement through more in-person touch points and gatherings – for example, through team lunches for small disease site groups, informal coffee & donuts, in-person faculty meetings, and informal Town Halls at our three main campus sites. We find that these moments bring us closer and create space to share ideas, concerns and other issues that may get missed especially as we navigate changes at our institution and nationally. We will continue to host these gatherings and to hope to see you there (some pictures below).

We also proudly graduated our medical and physics residents last May and welcomed our 2025-26 incoming class of residents. Please keep up the inspiring, innovative, and hard work!

As some of you may be aware, we have been working hard over several years to acquire proton therapy for our cancer patients. This July, the developers of our future Proton Therapy Center broke ground on schedule at the Dogpatch Power Station. We met with our proton therapy equipment manufacturer from Hitachi/Japan and toured the site. Though it will take time, we remain excited about the future new center and vital care and research that will take place to serve our patients and mission.

Warmest regards,

Cathy

UCSF Cancer Center ready to rise at Power Station — ‘It will set the tone for everything that goes forward’

"The time is right for UCSF, which has been searching for more than a decade for an appropriate site to raise a proton therapy center, according to Dr. Catherine Park, who chairs its radiation oncology department. The treatment more precisely targets cancer cells than conventional therapies, sparing more of the surrounding tissue from radiation; it is especially useful for treating pediatric cancers, Park said, and there are increasing use cases for the treatment among adult patients, too." Read SF Business Times article here

Sue Yom, MD, worked on a collaborative effort with Eleven Labs AI company to recreate the lost voice of a patient - showing the promise of AI voice technology and future research on patients' communiation and quality of life.

Read KQED Article and Listen to the segment here

Using AI and Medical Informatics to Make Fundamental Cancer Discoveries 


Julian Hong, MD, MS, associate professor, has been awarded by the new Weill Cancer Hub West - a collaboration between UCSF and Stanford - to build artificial intelligence systems that integrate clinical and biological data for precise, personalized cancer treatments. Hong continues to spearhead computational, machine learning and AI-driven research in our department and at UCSF-at-large (Learn more in publications below).

Read SF Examiner story and UCSF Announcement on Project IMPACT/Weill Cancer Hub West

Julian Hong, MD, MS, associate professor, Radiation Oncology, Affiliate Faculty member, Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute, Core Faculty member, UCSF-UC Berkeley Joint Program in Computational Precision Health

Our department is involved with some of the most important and innovative clinical trials in radiation oncology.

Mary Feng, MD, Vice Chair for Clinical Research

Current Trial Highlights

CC#23722: Wearable Activity Tracking to Curb Hospitalizations (WATCH) PI: Julian Hong

CC#194522 RT-DT : Phase II Trial of Durvalumab (MEDI4736) with/without Tremelimumab for Advanced Hepatocellular Carcinoma after Palliative Hypofractionated Radiotherapy PI: Mary Feng

Other Enrolling Clinical Trials

CC#239814: An Evaluation of Changes in the Relationships Between Fatigue and Molecular Mechanisms in Cancer Patients Receiving Curative-Intent Combined Chemotherapy and Radiation Therapy (CCRT) PI: Sue Yom

CC#24721: An International, Prospective, Open-label, Multi-center, Randomized Phase III Study comparing lutetium (177Lu) vipivotide tetraxetan (AAA617) versus Observation to delay castration or disease recurrence in adult male patients with prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA) positive Oligometastatic Prostate Cancer (OMPC) (PSMA-DC) PI: Steven Seyedin

CC#24726: Induction Chemotherapy Response-Guided Radiation for EBV-Associated Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma (NPC) PI: Sue Yom

Tumor-informed ctDNA testing for minimal residual disease monitoring following curative-intent treatment of squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck (CtDNA) PI: Jason Chan

CC#23721: Two-fraction High Dose Rate Brachytherapy as Monotherapy Delivered Three Hours Apart in Localized Prostate Cancer: A Pilot Study PI: I-Chow “Joe” Hsu

NRG-BN012: A Randomized Phase III Trial of Pre-Operative Compared to Post-Operative Stereotactic Radiosurgery in Patients with Reselectable Brain Metastases PI: Steve Braunstein

NRG HN006: Randomized Phase II/III Trial of Sentinel Lymph Node Biopsy Versus Elective Neck Dissection for Early-Stage Oral Cavity Cancer PI: Jason Chan

CC#24724: A Pilot trial of adjuvant hypofractionated stereotactic radiosurgery for intermediate-risk meningioma (SRS-AIM) PI: William Chen

Dr. William S. Chen will joined our Medical faculty on October 1, 2025, as an Assistant Professor and will provide radiation treatment for patients with genitourinary malignancies. He will be located primarily at Mission Bay. Dr. Chen received his MD at Yale School of Medicine, followed by his Radiation Oncology Residency at UCSF. He completed his undergraduate degree in Computer Science at Stanford University. Dr. Chen has a strong research interest in developing and validating biomarkers in prostate cancer using genomics and AI. In his spare time, he enjoys playing tennis, skiing, and listening to live music.


Dr. Hyeri Lee joined our Physics faculty on October 1, 2025, as an assistant professor. She will be located in Mount Zion where she will provide proton ocular service and routine physics coverage for external beam. Dr. Lee received her PhD in physics focusing on building electron accelerators for electron diffraction experiments from Cornell University. She completed her medical physics residency from Harvard Medical Physics Residency Program, then worked at the Ohio State University as a medical physicist and as an Assistant Professor providing external beam services including proton therapy. She contributed to commissioning Varian’s ProBeam 360 proton therapy machine. Dr. Lee has a strong research interest in developing MR-only workflows and utilizing dual energy CT in Radiation Oncology as well as Monte Carlo simulation in proton therapy. Outside of work, she enjoys the outdoors, and fiber arts including knitting and quilting.

Jae Lee has joined as Chief Radiation Therapist (RTT) in Mission Bay since September 2025. Lee comes to our department with 5-years of Chief Therapist experience, most recently at Stanford.


Alexis Perez joined as an Authorization Coordinator at Mt. Zion in September 2025.

Antonio Huitron joined as a Revenue Cycle Analyst at Mt. Zion in September 2025.

Larissa James joined the Berkeley Outpatient Center as a nurse in August 2025.


Nandar Paing joined in July 2025 as a front desk Practice Coordinator at Mt. Zion.

LaPrea Boudreaux joined in April 2025 as a Front Desk Practice Coordinator at Mission Bay.


Ella Behnke joined Mission Bay as a Medical Assistant in March 2025.

Clarissa Aguirre Luna joined Mission Bay as a Medical Assistant in June 2025.

Stacy Office joined Mission Bay/Parnassus as a nurse in August 2025.

Jennifer Rojas joined the Head and Neck Service as a Nurse Navigator in August 2025.

Jessica Rojas joined the Head and Neck Service as a Nurse Practitioner in September 2025.

Maria Morales joined Mission Bay as a Medical Assistant in October 2025.



Christina Spencer joined Parnassus as a nurse October 2025.

Miriam Gray, Educational Programs Manager

Dr. Steve Braunstein, MD, PhD, Residency Program Director

Dr. Katelyn Hasse, PhD, Director of Medical Physics Residency Program

The department hosted a graduation dinner with more than 70 guests in attendance. Graduates included PGY-5 medical residents and R2 physics residents

Medical Residents: Jie Jane Chen, MD., William Shelton Chen, MD, Katie Lichter, MD, MPH
Physics residents: Theodore Geoghegan, PhD, Garett Roe, MS

Learn more about Awardees and See Additional Photos

“Graduation is a major milestone to celebrate the transition from trainee to attending physician.”

Catherine Park, MD, Chair, UCSF Radiation Oncology

The department is also proud to welcome new medical and physics residents for the 2025-2026 academic year!

Other Updates

• Residents have been helping to host rotating medical students to showcase our department and the satisfaction of training in Radiation Oncology.
• We are also preparing to enter the application cycle for recruitment of new residents where faculty and residents will host applicants (virtually) over several dates this winter.
• The department is preparing for Physics recruitment with a virtual residency fair on October 8th and virtual interviews around February of next year.
• The fall picnic welcoming new residents and faculty will be held in GG Park on October 25th. See the Events section for details!

The Department of Radiation Oncology at UCSF held its first-ever Medical Physics in Imaging and Therapy Research Symposium last spring. More than 80 participants from the UCSF community and the broader scientific field attended for featured presentations and a scientific poster session showcasing innovative research in medical imaging and therapeutic sciences.

Read article and Learn about Award winners

Congratulations to Ke Sheng and team for winning first place in the LUMIR Challenge at MICCAI 2025 for "Zero-shot Multi-Contrast Brain MRI Registration by Intensity Randomizing T1-weighted MRI"! MICCAI is the largest international scientific community for medical imaging research. 

For this international competition, participants were asked to train their registration models on T1-weighted brain MR dataset; The evaluation additionally focused on zero-shot tasks that involve substantial domain shifts, such as high-field MRI, pathological brains, and alternate MRI contrasts. The first author Dr. Hengjie Liu was Dr. Sheng's PhD student at UCLA and recently joined UCSF as a post doctoral scholar.


Other updates:

• Virtual Physics Residency Fair takes place October 8th
• See some of the latest Physics research papers in Publications and additional honors in Accolades!