The Invisible Shield: Making Radiation Medicine Safer for Every American

Each year, it has been reported that approximately 1.7 million Americans are diagnosed with cancer (American Cancer Society, 2025). For many of them, radiation therapy, a precisely calibrated beam of ionizing energy aimed at destroying malignant cells while sparing the healthy tissues surrounding them, will be the gold standard for their treatment. The word “precisely” does the heavy lifting in this context because, in some cases, what differentiates a curative dose from the one that harms the cells could be a small fraction of a millimeter or some mathematical assumptions embedded deep inside a hospital’s treatment planning software.

Emmanuel Bankole wants to make sure those assumptions are right.

A medical and health physicist currently based in Arkansas, Bankole has dedicated his career to the science of radiation safety and dosimetry, the discipline of measuring and modeling how radiation moves through the human body and the built environment. His work largely sits out of public view, tucked away in the quality assurance labs of cancer centers and imaging facilities. But the questions he is pursuing have implications for patients, healthcare workers, and the broader infrastructure of radiation medicine across the United States.

Questioning a Foundational Assumption

Bankole’s most consequential research challenge concerns a statistical assumption that has long been baked into radiotherapy simulations: the uncertainty in the dose delivered to non-target tissues follows a normal, or bell-curve, distribution. This may sound technical. However, its consequences deeply affect humans.

Treatment planning systems (TPS) use probability models to predict exactly how much a tumor will be irradiated, and, inadvertently, Organs At Risk (OAR) such as the liver, spine, and heart. If these models are built on a flawed distributional assumption, there is a high probability that clinicians using them may systematically underestimate the risk of harm to healthy tissues in some patients and overestimate it in others; neither outcome is justifiable or acceptable.

“If the distribution we’re assuming doesn’t reflect what’s actually happening in the simulation, then the uncertainty bounds we report aren’t telling the whole truth,” Bankole explains. “And in radiation therapy, the whole truth is what keeps patients safe,” he asserts further.

Meanwhile, his master’s degree project at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, completed in December 2024, directly addressed this question, examining whether the normal distribution assumption holds up under scrutiny for non-target dose uncertainty in radiotherapy simulations. The findings demonstrate potential implications not only for individual treatment plans but also for the computational standards that thousands of clinics across the country rely on.

Building the Shield

Parallel to his dosimetry research, Bankole has spent years investigating the physical structures designed to shield ionizing radiation. His graduate thesis at the University of Lagos focused on Monte Carlo simulation, a powerful computational technique that models the probabilistic behavior of radiation particles as they pass through matter, to evaluate the effectiveness of different shielding materials for a Cobalt-60 radiotherapy unit.

Cobalt-60 machines remain in widespread use for cancer treatment around the world (Ramanathan, V. (2021). Getting the shielding right in the bunkers that house the machines is not merely a theoretical exercise, but a regulatory and ethical obligation of every facility that operates one. Bankole’s simulation work contributed directly to the science of how to do it better.

“Monte Carlo lets you ask ‘what if’ questions that you simply cannot ask or test-run in a real clinical environment,” Bankole says. “You can test fifty different shielding configurations on a computer before a single wall is ever built. That’s enormously valuable for facility designers, for regulators, and ultimately for the people who work in those rooms every day,” he affirms further.

From the Lab to the Clinic

Bankole’s work is not confined to simulation. Since March 2024, he has been employed as a Medical and Health Physicist at West Physics, one of the leading medical physics consulting firms in the United States. In that role, he conducts hands-on compliance testing and safety assessments for diagnostic imaging equipment: X-ray systems, CT scanners, MRI machines, Mammography units, Nuclear Medicine cameras, at hospitals and imaging centers across the region.

The work is governed by a thicket of federal and state regulations, which are enforced by bodies such as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, the American College of Radiology, and the Joint Commission. Every piece of equipment Bankole evaluates must meet strict performance standards before it is clinically used on a patient. His job is to make sure such contact, and in fact, any shortcomings stemming from it, are documented with clinical precision.

This is, in many ways, the practical application of everything he has studied. “You learn the theory in graduate school, but the real education is understanding how that theory interacts with the complexities of a real hospital environment,” he says. Explaining further, Bankole notes that “While every facility is a little different and every machine has its own quirks, the goal is always the same: to protect the patient, protect the staff, and make the science work in the real world.”

A National Challenge, a National Opportunity

The United States operates thousands of regulated radiation facilities, hospitals, cancer treatment centers, and imaging clinics under a patchwork of federal and state oversight frameworks. The standards governing how those facilities are designed, operated, and inspected flow from a relatively small community of researchers, clinical physicists, and regulators whose published work and professional consensus shape practice nationwide.

Bankole intends to become a meaningful voice in that community. His near-term goals include pursuing board certification through the American Board of Radiology (ABR), presenting research papers at conferences organized by the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM) and the Health Physics Society, and contributing to the task groups and working groups that develop the dosimetry and quality assurance standards the entire field relies upon.

The United States faces documented workforce challenges in medical physics, driven by retirements and a limited training pipeline. These shortages are especially pronounced in rural and underserved regions, where recruiting qualified medical physicists can take years and may limit access to advanced radiation oncology services. Consequently, each newly trained medical physicist represents an important addition to the national workforce (Kramer, D. 2023).

“This field needs people who understand both the computational aspect and the clinical side,” Bankole says. He then declares, “I want to be someone who can move between those worlds and help bridge the gap.”

A Path Built Across Two Continents

Bankole’s credentials include two graduate degrees, experience across two continents, and over a decade of increasingly advanced expertise. He graduated in the top one percent of his undergraduate physics class at Ekiti State University in Nigeria before earning a Master of Science in Medical Physics from the University of Lagos, where his Monte Carlo shielding research first established his reputation as a skilled computational physicist. He then crossed the Atlantic to complete a Master of Engineering in Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, one of the oldest and most prestigious technical universities in the United States.

Along the way, he has co-authored three peer-reviewed publications in 2025 alone, including one in Catalysis Science & Technology, published by the Royal Society of Chemistry. He holds certifications from the International Atomic Energy Agency in radiation protection and a Six Sigma Green Belt in healthcare, as well as professional memberships in both the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM), the Health Physics Society (HPS), and the American Physical Society (APS).

For a field that depends on the careful accumulation of expertise and the slow, methodical improvement of clinical standards, Bankole’s profile is exactly what the discipline needs: a researcher willing to question foundational assumptions, a clinician who has worked inside the facilities where those assumptions play out, and a professional committed to translating both into better outcomes for patients across the country.

The beam used to treat cancer is invisible. So is most of the work that makes it safe. Emmanuel Bankole is fine with that. The results are what matter.