Nuclear Physics Group

The Nuclear Physics Group (NPG) at Universidad Complutense includes more than 20 members, including three full professors, one of them an early MSCA fellow himself, four associate professors, six research fellows and postdoctoral researchers and more than ten PhD and MSc students. Its research covers Applied, Experimental and Theoretical Nuclear Physics.

We take part in international nuclear physics experimental collaborations suach as ISOLDE@CERN and other facilities, and in the areas of range verification for particle therapy, development of new detectors and radiobiology-guided treatment planning, with publications in the most important peer-reviewed journals of the field. We have hosted four MSCA research fellows in the last 5 years (three MSCA-COFUND and one MSCA-IF), and we collaborate with protontherapy centers as Quironsalud and CUN (Madrid), WPE (Germany) or the UPenn proton therapy center (Philadelphia, USA).

We have access to outstanding experimental facilities including two laboratories for nuclear detector test and development, employed both in experimental nuclear physics and its medical applications, a protoacoustic detection lab, and a further well equipped wet lab for biomedical engineering projects. The group has developed nuclear detectors exhibiting world record timing performance.

The group has a long collaboration with industry, having licensed products being exploited worlwide, constituting a substantial fraction of its research funds.

Particle therapy is a growing external radiotherapy that utilizes the properties of protons and carbon ions (vs. photons and electrons) to deliver more conformal dose distributions in the patients, maximizing doses to the tumor whilst minimizing risks to surrounding healthy tissues. In clinical proton therapy facilities, beams are accelerated to MeV energies and stopped within the patient body. The exact stopping position of a given beam is known only with limited accuracy due to uncertainties in patient positioning, imaging and treatment delivery; therefore, in order to fully exploit the potential of proton therapy, an in-vivo verification system, able to determine the beam range in the patient during irradiation with sub-millimetric accuracy, is desired.

At this moment, at the Nuclear Physics group we have several projects related with the advance of particle therapy and therefore, we welcome MSCA applicants with a synergistic interest in the following topics:
Development of contrast agents for PET and prompt-gamma range verification of particle therapy beams.
Development of an ultra-high-instant rates capable prompt-gamma detector suitable for modern synchrocyclotron accelerators.
Development of an ionoacoustic range detection system with advanced image reconstruction techniques.
Radiobiology and treatment planning for particle therapy.
Instrumentation for in-beam PET.
Ideal candidates should hold a PhD in Physics or Engineering in related fields such as nuclear physics, medical physics, dosimetry, nuclear medicine, image reconstruction, radiobiology radiation detection, etc. Applicants with a background in experimental nuclear or particle physics with an interest in medical physics and protontherapy are specially welcome.

Interested applicants should submit a short motivation letter, their CV (including their academic track record), and an executive summary of the proposed MSCA project (maximum 2 pages).