Dr. Johannes Petzoldt receives the 19th Christoph-Schmelzer-Preis for his PhD-thesis Dr. Johannes Petzoldt, former PhD-student in the working group of Dr. Guntram Pausch, receives the 19th Christoph-Schmelzer-Preis for his thesis “Toward the Clinical Application of the Prompt Gamma-Ray Timing Method for Range Verification in Proton Therapy“. With his thesis Dr. Johannes Petzoldt managed major steps towards the clinical implementation for the Prompt γ-Ray Timing (PGT) method. Based on experimental studies, he suggested the usage of a specific scintillation material for the PGT method. Furthermore, Dr. Petzoldt studied and characterized the time structure of clinical proton beams to further improve the sensitivity of PGT. In a last step, PGT prototypes were developed based on Dr. Petzoldt’s results on scintillation detectors as well as a high-throughput digital spectrometer, which was developed by an industrial partner within the PGT project. The prototype system was used in phantom studies in Pencil Beam Scanning mode in the treatment room of Universitäts Protonentherapie (UPT).
Currently, Dr. Johannes Petzoldt is employed as researcher by IBA (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgien).
With this prize the „Verein zur Förderung der Tumortherapie mit schweren Ionen e.V.“ annually honors outstanding master- or PhD-theses in the field of tumor therapy with ion beams. The official award ceremony took place on the 16th of November 2017 at the GSI Helmholtz-Zentrum in Darmstadt.
