Radiation Oncology

        Professor and Chair:     Thomas (T. J.) FitzGerald, MD

Administrator: Chris Riberdy

Office Staff: Karen Boland

Phone: 508-856-2062


The Department of Radiation Oncology:

  • is one of the largest in New England, providing state-of the-art clinical treatment service to cancer patients in Worcester County;
  • delivers more than 34,000 external tele-therapy treatments to patients each year at the UMass Memorial Medical Center University and Memorial campuses and the HealthAlliance Hospital campus in Fitchburg; and
  • houses an internal school for radiation therapy technology that has graduated 15 classes of highly specialized and actively recruited students since its inception in 1989.

The Department of Radiation Oncology provides radiation medicine to the region's oncology patients and serves as the academic infrastructure for radiation science for UMMS.

Using image guided platforms with three-dimensional treatment simulators for treatment planning and execution, the department provides extensive brachytherapy services including all facets of genitourinary and gynecological applications to patients.

Radiation Oncology houses the Quality Assurance Review Center, or QARC, which is the quality assurance vehicle and data management service for diagnostic imaging and radiation oncology for the National Cancer Institute clinical trials program. Led by the department chair as its director and principal investigator, the QARC acquires and reviews imaging and treatment objects on a pre-therapy basis to ensure compliance of treatment to protocol management for patients on clinical trials in nearly all clinical cooperative groups and image-guided industry trials. It is housed in Providence, Rhode Island.

The department has several research interests, with particular emphasis on signaling pathways and cellular adhesion molecules. Most of the targeted oncology therapies developed in the past five years include tyrosine kinase-based therapies that sensitize cancer cells to radiation therapy. Identifying the interactions between these therapies and radiation therapy is the focus of the translational research effort, with collaborations promoted through the departments of Cancer Biology and Cell Biology.