Ceferino Obcemea, MD

Ceferino Obcemea, Ph.D., joined Radiation Research in 2017 as Program Director in Medical Physics. He oversees a portfolio of grants that includes all aspects of clinical physics in radiation oncology, novel medical devices, new treatment modalities such as ion beam therapy, on-line imaging techniques as well as the emerging fields of AI applications in radiotherapy, Big Data analytics and machine learning. He also serves as the NCI medical physics liaison to the various clinical trial groups comprising the National Clinical Trials Network (NCTN).



Prior to coming to NCI, Dr. Obcemea had many years of experience as chief physicist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (Westchester campus NY), Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City and Georgetown University (Frederick campus). He received his clinical training at the Joint Center for Radiation Therapy, Harvard Medical School in Boston and is board-certified by the American Board of Radiology.

Dr. Obcemea completed his Ph.D. in Physics from Uppsala University, Sweden in the fields of many-body scattering theory and non-equilibrium quantum statistical mechanics. He received various research fellowships from the Svenska Institutet (Stockholm), Niels Bohr Institute (Copenhagen), International Center for Theoretical Physics, ICTP (Trieste) and the Quantum Theory Project (QTP) at the University of Florida, Gainesville among others. 

His current interests include machine designs for more affordable, compact, more robust accelerators, harmonization of clinical trial databases for discovery extraction and machine learning, radiomics for radiation oncology, new treatment regimens with particle beams, and radioimmunotherapy.