FACULTY ADVISORS

Faculty Advisors


Meet the Residents Association Faculty Advisors

The Radiosurgery Society® (RSS) Residents Association benefits tremendously from the guidance and insights of our distinguished Junior and Senior Faculty Advisors who have years of experience in their specialty and are actively involved in residency and training programs at their own institutions.

Senior Faculty Advisors

Nina Mayr, MD, FASTRO, FAAAS

Dr. Nina A. Mayr is Professor and Senior Academic Advisor to the Executive Vice President for Health at Michigan State University. She previously served as endowed Professor of Radiation Oncology at the University of Washington School of Medicine, which she joined in 2013 after establishing the Department of Radiation Medicine at the Ohio State University and serving as its inaugural Chair, and previously serving as the Director of Radiation Oncology and Professor & Vice Chair of Radiological Sciences at the University of Oklahoma (OU), where she built OU’s new radiation oncology facility.

Dr. Mayr has specialized in tumor imaging, women’s cancers, lung cancer, neuro-oncology and advanced radiation therapy technologies. For her research she has been awarded two NIH R01 grants for the study of functional/molecular imaging as a predictor of cancer treatment outcome, and she has been co-investigator on numerous other awards. She has been focusing on image-guided treatment delivery and advanced technologies in radiation oncology, such as stereotactic radiotherapy and radiosurgery, leveraging advanced imaging for therapy planning, adaptive therapy and response assessment.

She has published over 200 scientific articles, 13 book chapters, and co-edited 2 books, and made over 200 scientific presentations and 139 invited lectures and presentations. She has served as NIH reviewer and in numerous capacities in professional societies in her field, including the Chair of the Funding and Advocacy Committee of ASTRO and Chair of International Education. She served as Chair of the Subcommittee for Radiation Oncology & Radiobiology of the Scientific Program Committee of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA), Co-Director of the RSNA Instructional Education Course Track in Radiation Oncology, and the Joint ASCO/SSO/ASTRO Expert Panel on Management of Hereditary Breast Cancer Guideline. She is a member of the Human Resources Commission in the American College of Radiology (ACR) and the ACR Council of Affiliated Regional Radiation Oncology Societies (CARROS) Executive Committee. She is Co-Chair of the Clinical Working Group in the RSS GRID/Lattice, Microbeam and Flash Radiotherapy Working Groups.

Dr. Mayr has been awarded the elected Fellowship by ASTRO in 2011 and has been an Elected Fellow of the American Association of the Advancement of Science (AAAS) since 2006 for her work in imaging and women’s cancers. She received the Alice Ettinger Award of the American Association for Women Radiologists (AAWR) in 2013, the American Board of Radiology Lifetime Service Award in 2015, and the Fellow of AAWR in 2019 to recognize her contributions to Radiation Oncology education, mentorship and research

Susan C. Pannullo, MD

Dr. Pannullo is the Director of Neurosurgical Radiosurgery and Neuro-oncology at the Weill Cornell Brain and Spine Center. Both a neurosurgeon and a neuro-oncologist, Dr. Pannullo is board-certified in neurology and neurological surgery, is fellowship-trained in neuro-oncology, and has completed specialty training in stereotactic radiosurgery. She is one of the few neurosurgeons in the world with a neurosurgical practice focused only on stereotactic radiosurgery, and one of the few neurosurgeons in the country with access to three different technologies — Novalis, Gamma Knife and CyberKnife — for stereotactic radiosurgery procedures. In addition to her clinical practice, Dr. Pannullo serves in leadership positions in several important institutional and national organizations, including the Weill Cornell Institutional Review Board, the National Brain Tumor Society, the American Association of Neurological Surgeons, and the Brain Tumor Foundation.

Keep up with Dr. Pannullo on Twitter: @DrPannullo

Timothy D. Solberg, PhD

Dr. Solberg has extensive experience in the field of stereotactic radiosurgery, including installation, commissioning and clinical implementation of multiple systems/modalities, (Varian 600SR, Novalis, Novalis Tx, TrueBeam STX and Vero linac systems, CyberKnife G4, and GammaKnife Perfexion and ICON units. He has participated in the planning and delivery of over 4000 clinical cases, across the full range of indications. Dr. Solberg was senior author on the ASTRO white paper Quality and Safety Considerations in SRS and SBRT, and co-author on the AAPM Task Group Reports 101, Stereotactic body radiation therapy, and 68, Standards for relocatable stereotactic head frames. He has an extensive publication record in SRS/SBRT, including multiple books and book chapters. He has served on the Boards of Directors of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine, the International Stereotactic Radiosurgery Society, and the American College of Medical Physics.

Beyond radiosurgery, Dr. Solberg’s expertise is quite broad, and includes all aspects radiation physics and radiation oncology; medical imaging; clinical trials; medical informatics, artificial intelligence, and clinical decision support systems; proton therapy; and health policy, regulation, legislation and economics. Dr. Solberg has over 25 years experience in the medical device/software, medical physics and oncology fields, leading academic departments including UCLA, Penn and UCSF, and most recently, serving as the Senior Advisor for Medical Devices and Software in the Office of the Commissioner in the US Food and Drug Administration.

Winston Wen, PhD

Winston (Ning) Wen completed his PhD degree from Wayne State University and MBA from the University of Michigan. Winston has strong interests in many aspects of professionalism in medical physics including clinical care, research and education. He served as the Director of Clinical Physics at Henry Ford Health System and the Co-director of a stereotactic radiosurgery course at Henry Ford which has trained over 300 clinicians/physicists/therapists in the last five years. He has been a principal investigator on a Research Scholar Grant from the American Cancer Society and a co-investigator on several NIH or industry-funded research grants. His current research interest is to apply supervised and unsupervised machine learning algorithms to analyze omics data derived from medical images and cancer genome for patient risk stratification and treatment response assessment.

Junior Faculty Advisors

Emile Gogineni, MD

After growing up in the Greater Philadelphia Area, Emile Gogineni moved to Ann Arbor for his undergraduate studies, where he majored in music performance at the University of Michigan. After graduating, he moved to Washington DC, where he spent three years conducting basic science research in infectious disease and critical care labs at the National Institutes of Health, with a focus on mapping the Pneumocystis genome and on the development of a novel assay designed to test antibody levels in sera called LIPS.

During medical school, Dr. Gogineni developed an interest in oncology and pursued training in radiation oncology, which he completed at Northwell Health in New York. During residency, he conducted clinical research, producing over twenty publications, much of which focused on the use of stereotactic radiation in multiple subsites, including cancers of the head & neck, prostate, and pancreas, in addition to brain and spine metastases. He then joined Johns Hopkins University as an Instructor and Fellow, where he focused on proton irradiation.

He now serves as an Assistant Professor at The Ohio State University, where he focuses on head and neck cancers and proton therapy. In addition, he continues to conduct academic research related to particle therapy and stereotactic radiation, serving as the Principal Investigator on a trial studying hypofractionated preoperative proton therapy for soft tissue sarcoma. He functions as a Junior Faculty Advisor for the Radiosurgery Society, where he co-founded and co-leads a committee focusing on publishing case-based guidelines related to the use of stereotactic radiation for each oncologic subsite to guide clinicians while providing residents nationally and globally opportunities for mentorship. He also serves on the NRG Oncology Head & Neck and New Investigators Committees and the ACR Radiation Oncology Education Committee, where he leads the Webinar Initiative.

Keep up with Dr. Gogineni on Twitter: @EmileGogineni

Evan M. Thomas, MD, PhD

We are thrilled that Dr. Thomas has continued his journey with us. Dr. Thomas joined the RSS in 2014, one of our first member-in-training members. He was the first Chair of the RSS Residents Committee and helped develop the initial RSS Residents Program which recently evolved into the RSS Residents Association, open to all members-in-training of the RSS.

Dr. Thomas is settling into his new role, Assistant Professor of Radiation Oncology at Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center-James Cancer Hospital & Solove Research Institute, and will be updating his bio very soon.

Keep up with Dr. Thomas on Twitter: @EvanThomas84