The future of nuclear medicine would appear to be the paradigm of personalized medicine — targeted radionuclide therapy to spare healthy tissue, and theranostic medicine, which pairs an imaging isotope with a therapeutic isotope to provide simultaneous, real-time dose delivery and verification, leading to drastic reductions in prescribed patient dose. Candidate isotopes to meet these needs have been identified based on their chemical and radioactive decay properties, and the Bay Area Nuclear Data (BAND) Group is currently leading a series of campaigns to perform targeted, high-priority measurements of thin-target cross sections and thick-target integral yields. These studies will serve to facilitate the production of pre-clinical quantities of radioactivity for emerging and novel medical radionuclides. This talk will focus on the BAND Group's recent efforts to measure production cross sections for emerging medical radionuclides, develop new methods for the monitoring of charged-particle beams, and characterize tunable quasi-monoenergetic neutron sources for high specific activity isotope production. Along the way, we'll learn how a wide array of students have been integrated into key roles in these developments, and how the assortment of unexpected difficulties in precision nuclear data measurements can make "simple" experiments not so simple, after all.
Mr. Voyles received his B.S. in Chemical Engineering (2013) from the University of Utah, and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Nuclear Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. In his time at Berkeley, Mr. Voyles has led a number of efforts to develop novel medical radionuclides for pre-clinical studies, and can be found sailing the San Francisco Bay or brewing a variety of beverages in his free time.
