A summit held at Duke Kunshan University on developing medical physics in China attracted experts in the field from all over the world.
Organized by the DKU Medical Physics Graduate Program and co-hosted by the First People’s Hospital of Kunshan, the 3rd Global Forum on Medical Physics Education brought together scholars, entrepreneurs and other stakeholders to formulate a comprehensive teaching framework and curriculum tailored for China.
The aim is to ensure the country has enough medical physicists and technological expertise to fully exploit the population-wide health benefits deriving from a fast-moving field that is behind some of the most important advances in modern medicine.
Titled the “Disciplinary Development of Medical Physics with Chinese Characteristics”, the forum focused on ways to build up medical physics in China across areas such as medical imaging, nuclear medicine, and radiation therapy, protection, biology and engineering, as well as the teaching and clinical requirements of the discipline.
The format was a mixture of speeches and in-depth roundtable discussions involving nearly 50 leading experts and scholars from the medical physics field.
Giving the opening speech, Dr. Fang-Fang Yin, director of the Medical Physics Graduate Program at DKU, emphasized the importance of medical physics as an emerging and rapidly developing interdisciplinary field that has become crucial to improving the health of the general population. He expressed confidence in its irreplaceable role in the continuous development of modern medicine.
Dr. Scott MacEachern, vice chancellor for academic affairs at DKU, highlighted the key role played by the medical physics program in the university’s development as an innovation hub. MacEachern said he is confident that Duke Kunshan will continue to make significant contributions to medical physics in China, both through the training of high-level medical professionals and by driving and supporting advances in research and practice.
Dr. Chong Li, president of the First People’s Hospital of Kunshan, emphasized its longstanding collaboration with the medical physics program at DKU and called for those strong links to continue in the form of co-developing products for clinical use and jointly driving technological progress.
Dr. Mark Oldham, director of the Medical Physics Graduate Program at Duke University, recounted the collaborative journey to establishing the DKU version back in 2014 as he underscored the latter’s importance not just to the development of medical physics in China but also for the entire global medical physics community. He said the partnership between both programs was valuable for fostering knowledge exchange, research collaboration and cross-cultural dialogue.
Together with Duke, DKU founded the Medical Physics Graduate Program to prepare high-quality professionals and academics for working in cutting-edge medical fields in China and internationally.
The program has engaged in many pioneering projects, collaborating with hospitals and leading medical technology enterprises, integrating industry, academia, research and medicine, and providing valuable services to improve health.
Medical physics is the application of physics to the needs of medicine and underpins the technology behind radiology, radiation oncology, nuclear medicine and other crucial interventions for diseases such as cancer.
