News
Professor Katia Parodi elected Fellow of AAPM
9 Aug 2024
The Society honors members who have distinguished themselves through their contributions in the areas of research, education or leadership in the medical physics community.
Katia Parodi | © Raptor Konsortium
LMU physicist Katia Parodi has been elected Fellow of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM). Parodi received her award at the association’s 66th Annual Meeting & Exhibition in Los Angeles on 22 July 2024. The category of Fellow honors members who have distinguished themselves by their contributions in research, education, or leadership in the medical physics community.
Katia Parodi has been Professor and Chair of Medical Physics at the LMU’s Faculty of Physics since 2012, where she initiated a dedicated specialization in Medical Physics within the Master of Science in Physics. Her main research interest is in precision image-guided radiation therapy with protons and heavy ions, with the goal of developing new sources of radiation and imaging techniques that can improve cancer treatment.
Advanced detector technology
She received her PhD from the University of Dresden, was a postdoctoral researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, USA, and worked as a group leader at the Ion Beam Therapy Center in Heidelberg, where she completed her habilitation degree in 2009. In 2016, the European Research Council (ERC) awarded Parodi a prestigious Consolidator Grant.
Katia Parodi is currently a partner in the “Biomedical Applications of Radioactive Ion Beams” project led by the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt, which is funded by an ERC Advanced Grant. Within this project, she and her team are developing an advanced detector technology which uses the photon emissions produced during treatment to visualize the beams and pave the way for unprecedented accuracy of beam delivery.
Katia Parodi has published over 300 peer-reviewed papers and received several awards, including AAPM’s John S. Laughlin Early Career Scientist Award. From 2017 to 2018, she served as President of the German Society for Medical Physics. Since 2021 she is the Editor-in-Chief of the Physics in Medicine and Biology journal.