Tong Zhu, PhD, DABR
Associate Professor of Radiation Oncology
Chief, MRgRT Services
- Phone: 314-273-1447
- Email: zhut@nospam.wustl.edu
Additional Titles
- Chief, MRgRT Services
Education
- BSc, Biomedical Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China (1996)
- MSc, Biomedical Engineering, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, USA (2004)
- Ph.D., Biomedical Engineering, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, USA (2009)
- Medical Physics Residency, University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), Ann Arbor, MI, USA (2015)
Board Certification
American Board of Radiology in Therapeutic Physics (2017)
Biography
Tong Zhu, Ph.D., DABR, is an associate professor of Radiation Oncology and he joined the medical physics faculty in 2021. He was trained as an MRI physicist with his Ph.D. study that focused on improving diffusion tensor MRI (DTI) techniques for quantitative analysis of neurological disorders in brain. He discovered radiation therapy in 2011 when he was an MRI research faculty of Radiology at the University of Rochester, working on translational MRI research for neurological disorders and brain tumors. Subsequently, he entered the medical physics residency program at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) in 2013 and joined the Department of Radiation Oncology of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) as an assistant professor in 2016. During his time at UNC, he co-led clinical trials for MRI-guided quantitative assessment of both tumor response to radiation and neurocognitive decline associated with brain radiation treatment. He also led the effort towards integration of an innovative quantitative MRI technique, MR Fingerprinting (MRF), for RT applications. Collaborating with the team of experts in MRI-aided adaptive RT at WUSTL Radiation Oncology and Radiology, he focuses his research on integrating physiological/functional information from quantitative MRI (diffusion MRI and MRF) to support better tumor control and better characterization of normal tissue toxicity with adaptive RT.