Jun 19, 2020

New Appointments: MBP Welcomes Five New Researchers

Photo of newly-appointed researchers

Medical Physicists Headshots

The Department of Medical Biophysics is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Jean-Pierre Bissonnette, Associate Professor, Dr. Catherine Coolens, Associate Professor, Dr. Thomas Purdie, Associate Professor, Dr. Alexandra Rink, Assistant Professor and Dr. Robert Weersink, Assistant Professor to the Department of Medical Biophysics. To help you get to know them, we have provided a brief biography for each of them below.


Dr. Jean-Pierre Bissonnette

Dr. Jean-Pierre Bissonnette is the Associate Head for Professional and Academic Affairs for the Department of Medical Physics at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, where he has been employed since 2003. Prior, he was the coordinator then interim Head of Physics at the Centre Hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal. He graduated from McGill University with a M.Sc., then obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Western Ontario in 1996.

Dr. Bissonnette has been active in several areas relevant to radiotherapy, including quality assurance and patient safety, high-precision radiotherapy for the brain and the lung, post-graduate education, and monitoring response of locally-advanced lung cancer to combined chemo-radiotherapy using CT, CBCT and PET images. Current research topics include dose reconstruction based on image-guidance images, image-based adaptation of therapy and exploring the use of statistical tools to rationalize and limit the cost of quality control work.

Dr. Catherine Coolens

Dr. Catherine Coolens is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto, Department of Radiation Oncology and a Staff Medical Physicist in the Radiation Medicine Program at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre – University Health Network. She received her PhD in Medical Radiation Physics under Steve Webb at the Institute of Cancer Research, University of London working on Intensity-Modulated Radiation Therapy optimization. She consequently obtained her board-certification and worked at the Royal Marsden Hospital in London (UK) where she worked on organ-motion tracking and gated imaging and therapy techniques. In 2008 she was recruited to Toronto where she started her own lab.

Dr. Thomas Purdie

Dr. Thomas Purdie graduated from McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada with a B.Sc. (Hons.) in the Medical and Health Physics program of the Department of Physics and Astronomy in 1997. He then completed his Ph.D. in the Department of Medical Biophysics at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, Canada in 2002. Following graduate school, he completed a medical physics residency and research fellowship at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre (Toronto, Ontario Canada) in 2005. He is currently a Staff Medical Physicist in the Radiation Medicine Program, Princess Margaret Cancer Centre and became a Board Certified Medical Physicist (CCPM – Radiation Therapy Physics) in 2007. He is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Medical Biophysics and Radiation Oncology, University of Toronto and Affiliated Faculty at the Techna Institute, University Health Network. Dr. Purdie’s research focuses on developing and clinically implementing machine learning based treatment planning and quality assurance (QA) processes in radiation oncology.

Dr. Alexandra Rink

Dr. Alexandra Rink is a board certified Medical Physicist at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Radiation Oncology, University of Toronto and an Affiliated Faculty at the TECHNA Institute. She received her B.Sc. degree with honours in Chemical Physics from the College of Physical & Engineering Science at University of Guelph in 2003, and thereafter pursued a PhD under supervision of Drs. David Jaffray and Alex Vitkin in the Medical Biophysics department, at the University of Toronto. Her thesis, supported by the National Cancer Institute of Canada through a Terry Fox Foundation Research Studentship Award, focused on using polymer materials and optical fibre read-out in order to measure radiation dose remotely during the application of radiotherapy. Upon completion of graduate studies in 2008, Dr. Rink had commenced a Medical Physics Residency program at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre with the Department of Radiation Oncology. In 2010, Dr. Rink joined the Image-Guided Interventional Radiotherapeutics for Prostate Cancer group as a Clinical Physics Fellow and in 2012 the Radiation Physics department as staff. She has been leading the brachytherapy physics group at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre since 2013, helping implement image-guided interstitial treatments for gynaecological and prostate cancers. Dr. Rink has started her own lab at TECHNA Institute in 2019, with research interest in quality improvement of brachytherapy through dosimetric measurements using in-vivo optical fibre technology, understanding and monitoring organ motion and filling, target and applicator uncertainty and the impact on dose distribution, and implant accuracy and efficiency.

Dr. Robert Weersink

Dr. Robert Weersink is Scientist at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, University Health Network, and Assistant Professor in the Depts. of Radiation Oncology, Medical Biophysics, and at the Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering. Dr. Weersink earned a PhD in Chemical Physics at the University of Toronto. He worked as a staff scientist and manager of the Laboratory for Applied Biophotonics (Princess Margaret Hospital), then manager of the Guided Therapeutics (GTx) Program at UHN. He gained his certification as a Clinical Physicist in 2012 and has been a member of the brachytherapy team at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre since then. His research focus is on developing new technologies in image-guided therapy with clinical applications in radiation medicine and surgery.

Please join us in welcoming Dr. Bissonnette, Dr. Coolens, Dr. Purdie, Dr. Rink and Dr. Weersink to Medical Biophysics.