Rate My Professor Ruirui Liu

Ruirui Liu, PhD, is an assistant professor and medical physicist in the Department of Radiation Oncology at the University of Nebraska Medical Center since November 2023. He provides clinical support in high dose rate and low dose rate brachytherapy, gamma knife, stereotactic body radiation therapy, and proton therapy. His research leads in computational radiation biology, proton FLASH therapy, computational dosimetry, and AI applications. Prior to UNMC, he completed a medical physics residency at Emory University (2020–2023), publishing on machine learning in radiotherapy, proton FLASH, and radiobiology simulations. He served as postdoctoral research associate at Washington University in St. Louis (2017–2020), developing dual energy CT for proton therapy and brachytherapy, and simulation tools for nanoparticle-enhanced radiotherapy. Dr. Liu earned his PhD in radiation health physics from Oregon State University (2012–2017), after working as assistant research scientist in China (2010–2012), and holds a B.E. in nuclear engineering from Chengdu University of Technology (2007).

Dr. Liu is certified in Therapeutic Medical Physics by the American Board of Radiology (2024) and as Certified Health Physicist by the American Board of Health Physics (2019). Key publications include "A potential revolution in cancer treatment: A topical review of FLASH radiotherapy" (2022), "An integrated physical optimization framework for proton stereotactic body radiation therapy FLASH treatment planning allows dose, dose rate, and linear energy transfer optimization using patient-specific ridge filters" (2023), "Synthetic dual-energy CT for MRI-only based proton therapy treatment planning using label-GAN" (2021), and "Modeling gold nanoparticle radiosensitization using a clustering algorithm to quantitate DNA double-strand breaks with mixed-physics Monte Carlo simulation" (2019). He received the American Cancer Society Institutional Research Grant pilot (2025) for "Development and Validation of a Dynamic Treatment Planning System for Ultrasound-Guided High-Dose-Rate Brachytherapy in Prostate Cancer". Dr. Liu has authored 35 peer-reviewed papers, one book chapter, and over 50 abstracts, impacting advanced dose calculations, radiation biology, and protection.