Bridging nanotechnologies and biomedicine through 2D Materials
The Program’s training season started right in January with the online course 2D Materials for Biomedical Applications, under the scientific coordination of Artur Pinto (LEPABE – Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto, Portugal) and Jean Anne Incorvia (The University of Texas at Austin, USA).
Designed to give in-depth coverage of the extensive library of 2D materials and pinpoint potential applications in healthcare, the course also shed light on some of the theoretical foundations and research challenges underpinning the work Pinto and Incorvia will be carrying out in their Exploratory Research Project (2D-Therapy) New 2D nanomaterials for cancer phototherapy and immunotherapy.
Almost 200 people from over 23 countries registered for the course to be guided by experts from UT Austin and Portugal through the opportunities and challenges of bringing such materials into diagnosing or treating diseases.
The full course can be viewed again on the Program’s Youtube Channel.
From challenges to solutions: BigHPC’s webinar series is back
After the success of the 1st BigHPC Webinar Series, the UT Austin Portugal Program and the BigHPC consortium are back with a second round of webinars, planned to run every two months from March 2022 to March 2023.
The second series debuted on March 10 with a talk by Samuel Bernardo, Software Engineer at BigHPC’s partner Laboratório de Instrumentação e Física Experimental de Partículas (LIP) and moderation by Bruno Antunes, Research and Development Manager at Wavecom, the Portuguese SME leading the BigHPC project.
Bernardo talked participants through the technical capabilities and advantages of adopting the GitOps framework to deliver fast innovation over BigHPC. GitOps is an operational framework that takes DevOps best practices used for application development and applies them to infrastructure automation (source: GitLab). The recorded session can be viewed on the Program’s Youtube Channel.
This second webinar series breaks away from the perspective used in On the Road to HPC: Major Challenges and New Opportunities edition – 1st Webinar Series as it focuses on concrete applications of HPC and Big Data. The upcoming webinar, due to happen in May, will be conducted by Ricardo Macedo (INESC TEC). More information on this session will be shared in the next few weeks.
UT Austin Portugal Program teams up with the University Coimbra to organize ECTs-awarding course in Medical Physics
The 2022 edition of the Online Advanced Course on Biomedical Imaging, organized by the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Coimbra (FMUC), kicked off in March with the full support of UT Austin Portugal. The International Partnership was invited by Maria Filomena Botelho, Director of the Biophysics Institute of FMUC and scientific coordinator of the course, to come aboard and put together two thematic sessions: one dedicated to PET (Positron Emission Tomography), the other to Proton Therapy, where two projects the Program has been supporting in Medical Physics – TOF-PET for Proton Therapy and AT@PT – Automatic Treatment Planning for Proton Therapy – will also be highlighted.
Narayan Sahoo, Professor at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center (MDACC) and one of the Principal Investigators of the TOF-PET for Proton Therapy, led this work, mobilizing several experts from MDACC to lecture in the course in April and June. In addition to MDDAC experts, João Seco and Oliver Jäkel, from The German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), have also been invited by the Program to speak at the course. Seco has been a regular speaker at the Program’s training in Medical Physics, having chaired the evaluation panel of the 2021 Call for Exploratory Research Projects. Jäkel has served on the Program’s External Review Committee since 2019, representing the area of Medical Physics.
In the first call for registrations, 175 people were accepted to the course, which seeks to give participants a comprehensive overview of the main imaging methodologies used in biomedicine. The Program is now opening a new period of registrations for those wishing to attend specifically UT Austin Portugal’s PET and Proton Therapy Sessions on April 22 and June 3 and Oliver Jäkel’s lecture on New Methods in Radiotherapy: MR-guided.
Since the start of Phase 3, this is the first course bearing the Program’s seal that will award ECTS units to participants who comply with FMUC’s attendance and evaluation requirements.
The course will be running online on Fridays until June 3 in a total of eleven 5-hour long sessions. More information can be found here.
