Congratulations to our outstanding former interns!
After their experience in the Spring 2020 Medical Physics Undergraduate Internship Program under Dr Barreto, these four ladies overcame the limitations of the COVID-19 pandemic and pursued further academic opportunities.
- Jessica Dominici, an undergraduate student in Nuclear Engineering, joined a research project under Dr Andreas Enqvist, Director of UF’s Nuclear Engineering Program, where she helped radiation testing on the Europa satellite for NASA’s Planetary Protection Program. She also became a Proton Therapy Blogger for Mission Search, a healthcare staffing company. In Summer 2021, she will serve as a Medical Physics Intern at Tampa General Hospital’s Cancer Center where she will be conducting dosimetry research for cervical cancer under Dr Lawrence Berk, a radiation oncologist. She expects to graduate Spring 2022 and plans on applying to medical physics graduate programs.
- Cheima Hicheri graduated from UF with her degree in Biomedical Engineering and worked as a laboratory technician in Dr Disterhoft’s laboratory at the Department of Physiology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. Her research focuses on understanding the biological and behavioral markers of learning and memory in Alzheimer’s disease rat models. She has applied for graduate programs in biomedical imaging and is waiting to hear back now.
- Cindy McCabe, an undergraduate student in Nuclear Engineering, was awarded the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM) DREAM Fellowship Award in Summer 2020, during which she performed a virtual Dual Energy CT research project supervised by Dr Izabella Barreto. She attended the AAPM’s 2020 Annual Meeting and had her abstract accepted to present her research project at the AAPM’s 2021 Spring Clinical Meeting, titled “CT Number Accuracy Along the Z-Axis of a Wide-Beam 320-Detector Dual Energy CT Scanner”. She has applied for graduate programs in medical physics and is waiting to hear back now.
- Liana Mulet graduated from UF with her degree in Nuclear Engineering and performed research on a new beta-emitting brachytherapy source for conjunctival tumors under a joint collaboration with Dr Izabella Barreto and Dr Chris Deufel, a medical physicist at the Mayo Clinic. She has applied to graduate programs in medical physics and is waiting to hear back now.
We are very proud of these outstanding students and look forward to their bright futures.