If you have cancer and you live in a low or middle-income country, you’re unlikely to have access to the radiotherapy treatments that patients in higher-income countries take for granted. A global collaboration including engineers and physicists from the Large Hadron Collider with International Cancer Expert Corps (ICEC), the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), Daresbury Laboratory, Lancaster and Oxford University and users in Africa and other Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs) is aiming to change the current status quo.

Professor Manjit Dosanjh is the Project Leader for STELLA (Smart Technologies to Extend Lives with Linear Accelerators), honorary CERN Staff, the particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland and Visiting Professor at the University of Oxford. She holds a PhD in Biochemical Engineering from the UK and her professional efforts in the fields of biology and the medical applications of physics span more than 30 years, during which she has held positions in various academic and research institutions in Europe and the U.S., including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) at the University of California, the European Commission Joint Research Centre (EC-JRC) in Italy. Dosanjh joined CERN in 1999 where she has worked to apply technologies originally developed for particle physics to the domain of life sciences, aiming to translate and transfer knowledge about physics to society at large. She played a key role in launching the European Network for Light Ion Hadron Therapy (ENLIGHT), a multidisciplinary platform that takes a collaborative approach to particle and radiation therapy research in Europe, and she is the coordinator of the network since 2006. https://enlight.web.cern.ch/ She is also actively involved in helping non-profit gender-related organisations in science and technology for development in Geneva and is a board of director for ICEC (International Cancer Expert Corps). https://www.iceccancer.org/