Team

RR244, Heath Science Building

1959 NE Pacific St, Seattle, WA 98195

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Clemens Grassberger, PhD

Associate Professor, University of Washington

Joint Associate Professor, Radiation Oncology Division, Fred Hutch Cancer Center

Clemens is an Associate Professor in Radiation Oncology at University of Washington, with a joint appointment at Fred Hutch Cancer Center. He has a long standing interest in mathematical modeling of cancer and its response to treatment, particularly the immune response to radiotherapy and how to optimize radiation-drug combination regimen. He has received the 2021 AAPM John S. Laughlin Early-Career Scientist Award and his work describing the first framework to calculate dose to circulating lymphocytes won the Roberts Prize 2022 for best paper published in Physics in Medicine and Biology. His lab is funded by NIH and several foundations.

The Grassberger Lab has a wide range of interests, connected by mathematical modeling of cancer treatment response. We build models that either predict clinically actionable outcomes in patients or simulate biological system to gain increased understanding of underlying mechanisms.

In his free time Clemens explores with his son, taking advantage of the great Pacific Northwest for skiing, mountainbiking, hiking, and surfing - and hopes to share those adventures with his team.

Alumni Outcomes

We are proud when members of our team make the next step and see alumni outcomes as an important metric - our trainees have gone on to various positions and we try to guide them into positions/roles they desire, which is an ongoing conversation that determines the projects they work on, the meetings they go to and the skills they acquire during their time in our lab. Below a list of alumni outcomes highlights:

Yejin Kim (Postdoc 2024-2026): now resident in the Harvard Medical Physics program

Chris Beekman (Postdoc 2022-2023): now Assistant Professor at MGH/Harvard

Yeseul Kim (Student 2022-2023): worked on predictive modeling, now Graduate Student at MDACC

Lucas McCullum (Student 2021-2022): now Graduate Student at MDACC

Ibrahim Chamseddine (Postdoc 2020-2023): now Assistant Professor at MGH/Harvard

Wonmo Sung (Postdoc 2019-2021): now Assistant Professor at Catholic University of Korea

David McClatchy (Resident in Research Year 2018-2019): now Medical Physics Faculty, MGH/Harvard

Yanjing Li (Student 2018-2019): now Medical Physics Faculty, MGH/Harvard

Changran Geng (Postdoc 2016-2017): now Professor at Nanjing University

Team Members

Yejin Kim, PhD

Research Fellow, working on cardiac toxicity, modeling re-irradiation, and interested in any topic in radiation oncology benefiting from advanced data analysis

Nils Peters, PhD

Research Fellow, working on Dual-Energy CT applications in radiation oncology

Joseph deCunha

UW Medical Physics Resident, working on FLASH & lymphocyte depletion

Madeleine Kaiser

Physics Undergraduate, working on lymphocyte recirculation between tumor and lymph nodes in mice

Owen Vellegas

Computer Science Undergraduate, working on predicting skeletal-related events in patients with bone metastases

Eric Jackson

2026 AAPM summer student, working on DECT

Yoonji Kim, RN

Doctor of Nursing Practice(DNP) program student at the University of Washington, research assistant and lead data coordinator for our lab

Yeseul Kim

Graduate Summer Internship 2025 - sponsored by Dr. Yejin Kim's Data Science fellowship

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Students

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Student Research Opportunities

We're always happy to welcome students interested in Medical Physics or data driven cancer research into our lab for summer internships or similar opportunities.

All our research requires some coding, so an interest in that is important. We have a range of projects available in the areas we are focused on.

Alumni