Bursaries reports

Lena Nenoff (OncoRay)

Visit to The University of Manchester, hosted by Eliana Vasquez Osorio

2^nd - 15^th June

I am very grateful for the collaboration bursary provided by the ARR. This grant enabled me to enhance my research collaboration on deformable image registration uncertainties with Dr. Eliana Vaszquez-Osorio from the University of Manchester. During a two-week visit to Manchester, we worked together on developing an open-access code for easy-to-use deformable image registration uncertainty quantification. This resource will ease the comparison of these uncertainties across institutions, imaging modalities, time intervals between images, and anatomical areas, without the need to exchange data. The visit was essential for the progress of the code development, particularly in extending its applications to various data formats and use cases.

Furthermore, the collaboration bursary afforded me the opportunity to visit and learn from one of the leading cancer centers in the UK and the world. I had the chance to meet new colleagues, which I hope will lead to more collaborations and an exchange between our research centers in the near future. For both Eliana and me, this bursary is an important step forward in our scientific careers.

Miki Yoneyama (ICR)

ImmunoRad conference (7th edition)

27^th-29^th September 2023, Paris

I’m very grateful to the ARR for this travel bursary, which gave me the opportunity to present some of my PhD work on the characterisation of radiation-induced immune changes in breast cancer at the 7th edition of ImmunoRad in Paris. I have been developing this work at Dr Navita Somaiah's group at ICR.

The ImmunoRad conference focuses specifically on radiotherapy and immunotherapy combinations, so the poster session allowed me to discuss my research with leading experts in this field, as well as with other early-career researchers working on similar questions.

All the talks were also highly relevant for my project – overall I felt that the conference gave me a lot of new ideas for things I want to explore with the time I have left in my PhD!