Author: Issam El Naqa

Issam El Naqa is founding Chair of Machine Learning Department and Associate  Member of Radiation Oncology at Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida.. He is board certified as a medical physicist by the American Board of Radiology. Dr. El Naqa received his BSc (1992) and MSc (1995) in Electrical and Communication Engineering from the University of Jordan, Jordan. He completed his Ph D (2002) in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL, USA, receiving the highest academic distinction award for his work. He also completed an MA (2007) in Biology Science at Washington University, where he was hired as an instructor (2005–7) and then an Assistant Professor (2007–10) in the departments of radiation oncology and the division of biomedical and biological sciences. He subsequently became an Associate Professor at Mc Gill University Health Centre/Medical Physics Unit (2010-15). He later joined the Department of Radiation oncology atthe University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (2015-20), where he was a Professor and associate member in Applied Physics and the Michigan institute of data science. Dr. El Naqa is a recognized authority in the fields of machine learning, data analytics, and oncology outcomes modeling and has published extensively in these areas with more than 200+ peer-reviewed journal publications and 4 edited textbooks. He has been a member and  fellow of several academic and professional societies including AAPM and IEEE. His research has been funded by several federal and private grants in Canada and the USA and served on national and international study sections. He acts as a peer-reviewer and editorial board member for several leading international journals in his areas of expertise. Martin J Murphy  is Professor Emeritus of radiation oncology at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), where he directed research into image-guided surgery and radiation therapy, employing principles of machine learning and neural networks. He received his Ph D in physics from the University of Chicago. Subsequently, he did research in nuclear physics, astrophysics, and space sciences at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, the University of Washington, and the Lockheed Palo Alto Research Laboratory before joining the original development team for the Cyber Knife in 1992. He continued Cyber Knife development and other image-guidance applications at Stanford before joining the radiation oncology department at VCU in 2003. He has been the principal investigator for numerous NIH and private sector grants to apply robotics and machine learning to image guidance.