In the Spotlight – Bruce Thomadsen

Bruce Thomadsen

Professor

“Don’t close your mind to ideas.”

Family?

I have a wonderful family: a loving wife and four children between us. I have a son and daughter-in-law in St. Louis who have twin boys, who are five, and a two-year-old; I have a daughter and son-in-law in Milwaukee who have a wonderful two-year-old girl and another one on the way; I have two daughters and sons-in-law in Portland, one with a six-year-old girl.

What book is currently on your nightstand?

I recently finished a mystery “Murder on a Kibbutz” by Batya Gur. Right now it’s “Cloud Atlas”. We saw the movie, loved that, and realized we need to read the book in order to understand exactly what was happening in the movie! So I’ve just started the book.

If you had a million-dollar research grant, what would you do with it?

Celebrate! That would be the first thing.

It depends what it was for. We have a lot of projects going on right now. Funding is very thin; it’s hard to keep the projects going, but we do so based on the enthusiasm of the students working on them. It would just make life a lot easier to have funding…and the students could eat then!

What is one little-known fact about you?

I don’t know a lot of little-known facts about myself. Reaching a bit, I study Talmud once a week with a group that’s been going on for an awfully long time. That’s about as esoteric as I can get!

SPOTLIGHT ARCHIVE

Bruce Thomadsen

What projects are you working on?

We have a bunch of projects, several dealing with radionuclide therapy. We have robotic brachytherapy, and we’ve been working on directional brachytherapy with Doug Henderson for quite a while. We’re working with Doug, Bryan Bednarz, and Larry DeWerd on some miniature detectors and their potential use in imaging for surgery. We also have another project dealing with assay of radioactive sources that are already in sterile packaging, which makes it a little bit challenging. I’m doing a considerable amount of work in patient safety and quality management theory right now.

How did you come to be in medical physics? What attracted you to the field?

Well, those are two different questions! How I got into the field was, when I graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in 1970, there weren’t any jobs. It was a very bad time for a physics graduate. My best friend’s father said, “Why don’t you come talk with our physicists at our hospital.” And I said, “What’s a physicist doing at a hospital?” So I went to talk with her, walking in with my motorcycle helmet under my arm, in a t-shirt and blue jeans, and found very shortly that I was in the middle of a job interview! They had a residency there, at Henry Ford Hospital, and one of the residents was just leaving. I was being shown around, talking to them about what they do, and two weeks later, I was in medical physics and teaching medical physics to residents and therapists.

What attracted me…well, I always enjoyed it, because, as everybody says when they apply to our program, they want to use physics to help people. And we do. That never wears out. The field is a lot of fun; I’ve always enjoyed the work.

What are some of the challenges of medical physics?

The challenges for somebody doing research in medical physics, and for the students working on their doctorates here, is trying to figure out where the field is going, and trying to keep ahead of the state-of-the-art; trying to work in the frontier where not everybody else is working. Also, coming up with new ideas that will actually prove fruitful and help the field.

What is the best advice you received?

The best advice I ever received was “think of the patient first.” That was from my mentor, who hired me despite my dress during the job interview, Lucille DuSault. That advice always works in this field. If you’re treating what do as patient-centered, it keeps you focused on where to go and what to do.

What is your advice for medical physics students?

Don’t close your mind to ideas. I didn’t get that advice from somebody; I learned it the hard way! Long ago, Rock Mackie came into my office when he was a relatively new faculty member here, and described a “great idea” he had, which was TomoTherapy. And as he described it, I said, “Rock, this is absolutely crazy. Don’t waste your time.” Obviously, I was dead wrong, and I’ve tried since that day to listen to ideas, to keep an open mind.

What are your outside projects?

One of the things I’ve been working on with Rock Mackie, Frank Rath, who is an industrial engineer here at the university, and Jatinder Palta, who is a medical physicist at VCU, is forming a non-profit patient safety organization called the Center for the Assessment of Radiological Sciences. This organization’s goal is to improve the quality and safety of radiotherapy and radiology. We have projects going with manufacturers to improve the safety of radiotherapy equipment.

What other career could you see yourself in?

Well, I went through my undergraduate with a double major in physics, which I always thought I would go into, and political science. I thought politics might be fun to go into. There weren’t any jobs in that either when I graduated.

I’ve always like writing. I do a lot of that anyway, but I thought that I could have gone into writing, particularly screenplays. I do write screenplays anyways, a lot of people do. I’ve never had any of them performed, not even close.

I could have become a rock singer. I was in a band in college. There weren’t a lot of jobs in that either. At the same time I was doing choral music; I like all kinds of music.

What accomplishments are you most proud of?

I was just appointed the chair of the Advisory Committee on the Medical Use of Isotopes for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. This commission has been around since the formation of the Atomic Energy Commission. This is the first time that a non-physician has been a chair of that committee.

I’ve always been proud of the work we did in the clinic. I was working in the clinic up until last year. I loved working with the patients, seeing them appreciate what we were doing and how it made them feel good. It was incredibly rewarding. That was a real accomplishment.

In the community, I was involved in establish and running a new Jewish cemetery. The city cemetery, which had a Jewish section, filled recently, and we needed to have a new cemetery. Trying to find space for a cemetery nowadays is very hard; there’s not a lot of space around. So I was part of a committee that helped find where to site it, and formed the board, the corporation to run the cemetery.