A small group of students from CERN, the John Adams Institute and the Cockcroft Institute, working on PhDs involving medical accelerators have recognised the need to increase international collaboration and cohesion between students who are researching or designing radiotherapy machines, or similar.Unlike many experiments which often have large collaborations and centralised locations around one facility, medical accelerators are spread throughout the world and have smaller research groups.  Whilst normally these groups would meet and exchange ideas at conferences or in-person, the pandemic has meant that newer and more recent students are less able to connect to establish friendships, help each other out with coding/simulation problems and exchange research ideas.


For this reason, a new Therapy & Oncology Accelerator Design Student network (the TOADS network), is being proposed. This is based in a slack channel. The idea is to create an informal environment for early-stage researchers including Masters students, PhD students and Post-Docs working on any aspect of radiotherapy (x-ray, electron, hadrons, radioisotopes etc.) from any sort of accelerator (linacs, cyclotrons, synchrotrons, FFAs, lasers, plasma etc.) on any aspect of it (design, operations, particle sources, gantries, VHEE, flash, imaging, simulations etc.) and to use the slack network in any way they require, according to their social or research needs.


You are invited to kindly please forward this email to your students, and also to any international connections who are working in medical accelerators, to help expand this exciting new network.


If you are a student who is interested in joining, please subscribe to the slack channel,  or email Rebecca  direct.