Steve Webb (medical physicist)

Steve Webb was born and grew up at Swindon in Wiltshire. He studied at Imperial College London, where he was awarded a BSc in 1970 and a PhD in 1973. The subject of his doctoral studies was cosmic-ray physics.[3]

Webb's former colleague Robert Speller, who later became head of radiation physics at University College London, had moved into the field of medical physics. This encouraged Webb to consider a career in the same field and, after consultations with his friend, he applied for a job at the Royal Marsden Hospital. Early on he worked in the field of CT. Webb and his colleagues built a CT scanner by cannibalizing a radioisotope scanner. He then moved on to research in nuclear medicine, with one of the hospital's first PET scanners (named MUPPET) housed in a freight container on a lorry in the car park.[3]

Arguably, Webb's most important work was on radiation therapy and included treatment planning and intensity-modulated and image-guided radiotherapies. In 1989 Webb published an important paper on radiotherapy treatment planning (Phys. Med. Biol. 34 1349) and went on to publish more than 150 papers on radiotherapy.[3]

In 1996 Webb was granted a professorship at the Royal Marsden and two years later he became head of the Joint Department of Physics. As Editor-in-Chief of the journal Physics in Medicine and Biology, Webb has been the journal's most published author.[3]

Webb retired in September 2011.

Webb has been awarded the EFOMP Medal by the European Federation of Organisations for Medical Physics,[4] the Barclay Medal by the British Institute of Radiology,[5] an Honorary Fellowship of the Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine,[6] and honorary membership in the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Medizinische Physik e.V., the German Society for Medical Physics.[7] In addition, he was awarded the degree of DSc (Med) Honoris Causa by the University of London.

• Webb, Steve (2015). Intensity-Modulated Radiation Therapy. CRC Press. ISBN 9781420034110.
• Webb, Steve (2009). "The contribution, history, impact and future of physics in medicine". Acta Oncologica. 48 (2): 169–177. doi:10.1080/02841860802244158. PMID 18766998. S2CID 25179082.
• Webb, Steve (2003). "The physical basis of IMRT and inverse planning". The British Journal of Radiology. 76 (910): 678–689. doi:10.1259/bjr/65676879. PMID 14512327.
• Webb, Steve (1989). "Optimisation of conformal radiotherapy dose distribution by simulated annealing". Physics in Medicine and Biology. 34 (10): 1349–1370. Bibcode:1989PMB....34.1349W. doi:10.1088/0031-9155/34/10/002. PMID 2682694. S2CID 250749172.

• Steve Webb publications indexed by Google Scholar