Luc BeaulieuPh.D.

Luc Beaulieu received his PhD from Laval University in 1996. After a postdoctoral fellowship in Berkeley, California, he worked as a research scientist at the Indiana University Cyclotron Facility in Bloomington. In 2000, he took the leadership of the medical physics research group at the Quebec City University Hospital. Under his leadership, a formal graduate medical physics teaching curriculum was set-up and became CAMPEP accredited in 2011. This was the first French CAMPEP training program in the world.

In addition to be a researcher at the Centre de recherche du CHU de Québec – Université Laval, Dr. Beaulieu is a full professor at Laval University, Director of the CAMPEP graduate program (since 2011) and also Director of the Laval University Cancer Research Centre (since 2012). From 2010 to 2016, he served on the Board of the Canadian Organization of Medical Physicists as President Elect, President and Past President. He is a member of the AAPM Brachytherapy Subcommittee, was the Chair of TG-186, and now leads the AAPM/ESTRO/ABG Working Group on Model-Based Dose Calculations in brachytherapy. He received research grants from all of the Canadian major funding agencies (CIHR, NSERC, NCIC, CCSRI) and NIH (R01 and SBIR). For the past 15 years, Dr. Beaulieu has worked collaboratively with a number of industrial partners for the design, building and validation of biomedical algorithms and devices. Since November 2015, he is the holder of an NSERC Industrial Research Chair related to biomedical technology for brachytherapy. He has served on grant panels for most of the agencies listed previously, and was Section Chair for the Medical Physics Panel in the last NSERC Discovery round (2017). He has mentored 70 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows and a similar number of undergraduate student research projects, published over 210 peer-reviewed manuscripts (with over 7 000 citations) and 445 refereed abstracts (all poster and oral presentations) at national and international meetings. He is a recognized expert in scintillation dosimetry and brachytherapy.

The ongoing objective of our research program is to increase the accuracy of dose measurements, dose calculations, and treatment delivery for radiation-based procedures including, but not limited to, radiation therapy, diagnostics, and interventional radiology. This is achieved through a comprehensive research program combining the elements of basic and applied research in medical physics and biomedical engineering. The program hinges on radiation physics, optics, numerical optimization problems, image and signal processing, and high-performance computing.

Four main research tracks

The current activities of the research program are based on four main research tracks, namely 1) development of new radiation dosimeters, 2) applied medical image processing, 3) numerical computation in optimization problems and high precision particle transport and dose calculations and 4) robotic medical devices. We are aggressively pursuing our optics-based radiation detector research track for which 3 patents have been granted, 2 provisional patents taken, and 1 technology licensed and commercialized. We have recently shown proof-of-principle for multi-point scintillation fiber dosimeters, a completely new concept in the field. My laboratory is a recognized world leader in optics-based dosimeter developments and the proposed program is intended to maintain and extend this lead. These research tracks have proven to be extremely productive in terms of scientific outputs, patents and HQP training over the last few years. The current program significantly extends the research topics. While the long-term application and commercialization potential are in the medical field (cancer, radiation therapy and radiology), the science discovery and technology development are embedded in a strong science and engineering research program. Our program has far reaching impacts: scientific, commercial, and ultimately on the quality of life of Canadians through the applications of said technologies.