Ana received a Licentiate Degree in Physics from the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain) in 2006, followed by a short-term ERASMUS exchange programme grant at the University of Umeå (Sweden). In 2011, she completed a PhD in experimental nuclear physics from the University of Brighton (UK), investigating the population of long-lived excited states in exotic radionuclides produced in high-energy fragmentation reactions. She then pursued a career in nuclear medicine as a postdoctoral research fellow at The Institute of Cancer Research. In collaboration with the Royal Marsden Hospital NHS FT, her research focused on the development of novel methods to enable patient-specific treatment planning for patients undergoing molecular radiotherapy (MRT) using multi-modality imaging, treatment response and patient outcome data. In 2015, she won the Eckert and Ziegler young investigators prize and was nominated for the Marie Curie award at the Annual Congress of the European Association of Nuclear Medicine (EANM) for her work on dosimetry and radiobiological modelling for patients with prostate cancer metastatic to bone.
In 2017, Ana joined NPL as a Senior Research Scientist in Nuclear Medicine Metrology and was elected as a committee member of the Medical Physics Group of the Institute of Physics (IOP).
Areas of interest
Ana’s interests focus on quantitative multimodality imaging and Monte Carlo radiation transport modelling for diagnostic and therapeutic applications of radionuclides in nuclear medicine. She is also interested in the study of the biological effects of radiation and the optimisation of pre-clinical imaging to improve reproducibility of experiments and therefore aid drug development and the evaluation of novel radiopharmaceuticals.
She is supervising PhD students working on improved image quantification for SPECT imaging through the implementation of partial volume correction methods and on the development of Precision treatment planning for radioembolisation of the liver using 90Y--labelled microspheres.
Email Ana Denis-Bacelar