Research

The Department of Radiation Oncology at UCI is committed to bringing together scientists and clinicians who share a passion for meaningfully advancing patient care through research and discovery. As an integral part of the NCI-designated Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, the Department ranks among the top programs in the country with respect to grant funding and is the home to an NIH multi-institutional P01 dedicated to the investigation of FLASH radiotherapy. To promote a team-based approach to research, strong collaborations have been fostered with collaborators across campus including the UCI Beckman Laser Institute, the Sue and Bill Gross Stem Cell Research Center, the Institute for Clinical and Translational Science, and the In-vivo Functional Onco-Imaging Facility. UCI Radiation Oncology also participates in NRG/RTOG and SWOG and is home to numerous investigator-initiated clinical and translational trials.

Our patients are the ultimate beneficiaries of the research initiatives actively being conducted at UCI. With a faculty group that has authored over 1000 original research publications in aggregate, UCI Radiation Oncology has been responsible for bringing attention to some of the biggest breakthroughs in cancer care. Indeed, much of the academic work being conducted at UCI has direct application to patients, and our growing team of investigators take pride in fostering translational research, a type of combined clinical and basic science investigation in which knowledge learned from the laboratory with genes, cells, or tissue is translated into therapeutic intervention for human subjects. Without translational research, much of what has been learned in the laboratory would not have been applied to the treatment of human cancers.

The future of research at the UCI Department of Radiation Oncology has never looked brighter. Our talented investigators are involved in nearly every aspect of cancer research. They are supervising laboratories, embarking on novel experiments, developing promising drugs, building new technologies, modifying radiation delivery systems, and analyzing outcomes—basically working around-the-clock so that cancer treatment can be increasingly fine-tuned for patients.