The Department of Medical Biophysics (MBP) offers a graduate program in interdisciplinary research in physics and biology, leading to the degrees of M.Sc. and Ph.D. The program was founded in 1958 under the direction of Harold Johns. The new interdisciplinary research model upon which the Department was based played a major role in defining biophysics world-wide. The original goal of the program, train graduate students in cancer research, has been broadened in recent years to include other areas of biomedical science. The first faculty members of the Department, originally entirely based at Princess Margaret Hospital, were staff scientist of the Ontario Cancer Institute. MBP was founded to provide an academic home for these scientists and their graduate students. This contributes to a unique element of MBP in that almost all of our faculty are Research Institute scientists, not tenured University of Toronto professors. As such, the Department does not offer an undergraduate program but graduate training and research.

The Ontario Cancer Institute/Princess Margaret Hospital (OCI/PMH) was established in 1957 to specialize in the use of radiation to treat cancer patients. OCI was originally composed of research divisions-one in physics to develop methods for delivering radiation treatments to patients and measure the dose that they received and another in biology to study the biological basis of cancer. This underscores the development of our Department name-research into biology and physics to understand the molecular basis and treatment of cancer-thereby “Medical Biophysics”.

The Department of Medical Biophysics has expanded and evolved considerably since it was founded. The Imaging Group moved to Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in 1990 and this group was enhanced by the recruitment of an active Cancer Biology Group. This established a “node” of the Department at SHSC. MBP faculty can also be found at Hospital for Sick Children, Mount Sinai Hospital/Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute, Canadian Blood Services and the St. George campus of the University of Toronto.

There was only a single academic stream in the Department until 1982 encompassing a common curriculum for both biology and physics students. The need for specialization was apparent resulting in the development of Medical Physics and Cellular and Molecular Biology streams. Subsequently, a Molecular and Structural Biology stream was added in 1995, with the recruitment of a Structural Biology division within OCI. All three streams are currently available to incoming students in MBP.