John Paul Cesar Email & Phone Number

I am an enthusiastic researcher who loves applying the tools and skills and intuition, learned throughout my career as a physicist, to a wide array of problems to help benefit humanity. The versatility and flexibility of a career researching in experimental high energy physics has motivated me to expand beyond and I hope to continue applying myself in fields such as medicine, climate change, energy and sustainability, and space exploration.My current role as a researcher focuses on improving the field of medical imaging via advancements in positron emission tomography (PET) scanners. Our research group at the University of Texas at Austin is using its long history at the forefront of particle physics detector R&D to help make novel PET scanners that can be used concurrently with proton beam therapy to make this treatment safer and more effective for patients. I'm proud of our group's work in realizing the design, fabrication, assembly, testing, and commissioning of a pre-clinical PET scanner that will be used in collaboration with MD Anderson Cancer Center (MDACC) to demonstrate the feasibility and value of live PET imaging during proton therapy treatments. Already, our group's early tests using a vastly scaled down PET system to image irradiation from a FLASH proton beam at MDACC has yielded highly promising results in publications that have generated a lot of buzz in the community (PMID: 37141903 and PMID: 37918021).My hope is to continue using the skills I have honed as a researcher to keep advancing technologies in a wide array of fields for the benefit of mankind. With many years of hands on experience in building and testing various physical systems as well as in developing software to analyze large data sets from such systems, I am always eager to apply this knowledge to exciting new problems.