University of Melbourne
Contact: Suzie Sheehy
The University of Melbourne is a public research university located in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Australia’s leading university, can look back at a rich and fascinating past spanning 160 years. Today over 8000 academic and professional staff support a vibrant student body of more than 48 000, including more than 13 000 international students from over 130 countries around the world.
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The Medical Accelerator Physics group at the University of Melbourne was created in 2019 as the first academic accelerator physics group in Australia. The group vision is to bring positive benefits to society through the development of particle accelerators and their applications, particularly in the medical domain. With Australia about to complete construction of its first proton therapy centre, there has never been a more important time to be globally connected in the field of medical accelerators.
Current projects at Melbourne University span from next-generation hadron therapy accelerator and gantry designs using both synchrotron and fixed-field alternating gradient accelerator technology to the development of robust linear accelerators for radiotherapy in Low and Middle-Income countries. The group have expertise in advanced simulation of beam dynamics, and frequently use novel optimisation techniques in their mission to realise novel accelerator physics concepts for societal applications. The group is currently installing the first X-band high power compact accelerator laboratory in the Southern hemisphere and the research programme in this laboratory will also expand to VHEE/flash therapy accelerator design and structure testing. This laboratory along with future plans for a scaled-energy flexible beamline test infrastructure and lab-based linac test-bed will create opportunities for new research collaborations and secondments through OMA, particularly in the area of facility design and optimisation.