PhD position at Universitat Autònoma funded PHYNEST project

Organisation/Company Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona Department Department of Physics Research Field Physics Researcher Profile First Stage Researcher (R1) Positions PhD Positions Country Spain Final date to receive applications 28 Feb 2026 - 23:59 (Europe/Madrid) Type of Contract Temporary Job Status Full-time Hours Per Week 37,5 Offer Starting Date 1 Oct 2026 Is the job funded through the EU Research Framework Programme?

Horizon Europe – COFUND Marie Curie Grant Agreement Number  Is the Job related to staff position within a Research Infrastructure? No

Modelling Tumour Dynamics and Radiotherapy Response:
Towards Sustainable and Energy-Efficient Cancer Treatments

A PhD position is available in the Department of Physics at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), under the supervision of Immaculada Martínez-Rovira and Pere Masjuan. The successful candidate will be enrolled in the Physics doctoral programme of the PHYNEST project. PHYNEST is a prestigious new MSCA-COFUND doctoral programme coordinated by the UAB, designed to recruit and train 25 doctoral candidates
. The programme focuses on advanced materials, innovative methodologies, and transformative solutions that address today’s most pressing challenges in the fields of energy transition and environmental sustainability
.

Research project : Solid tumors often undergo macroscopic growth arrest, a phenomenon that remains quantitatively unresolved despite extensive modelling efforts. This Ph.D. project aims to advance a renormalisation-group (RG) field-theoretical framework that captures the universal features of tumor arrest from first principles, with the goal of supporting more predictive and sustainable cancer treatment strategies.

The objectives of this Ph.D. thesis are twofold:

• to further develop and refine the RG-based model to enhance its biological interpretability and robustness across different tumor types;
• to extend the model to simulate and predict solid tumor response to innovative radiotherapy modalities such as spatially fractionated radiotherapy (SFRT) and FLASH therapy.

These emerging techniques, which show promise in increasing normal tissue sparing while maintaining tumor control, introduce spatiotemporal inhomogeneities in dose delivery. Such features challenge conventional models but may be naturally incorporated into the RG formalism via spatially varying couplings or external perturbations.

The candidate will explore how radiotherapy alters critical exponents, scaling behavior, and fixed-point structure within the model. Computational modelling and simulations will be key to validating theoretical predictions and identifying universal biomarkers of therapeutic efficacy.

Through a combination of theoretical physics, computational modelling, and interdisciplinary research, the candidate will contribute to advancing both our understanding of tumor dynamics and the development of sustainable, energy-aware technologies in modern radiotherapy.

Research groups: IONHE (2021 SGR 00607) is an interuniversity research group whose expertise covers a wide range of topics in the fields of Ionizing Radiation, Health and Environment. Regarding Health, the activities are related with the measurement and modeling of ionizing radiations exposure in different medical applications (radiotherapy, RX imaging, nuclear medicine). Concerning the environment, the group activities are related with the application of airborne radiation detectors carried by unmanned aerial systems for mapping radioactivity and source localization, modeling of radon levels and their progeny in closed buildings, tracers applications for climate and atmospheric processes.

SGR 00649 focuses on Particle Physics:
Standard Model (SM), Beyond the Standard Model, and Astroparticles and Cosmology. We focus on improving the determination of fundamental SM parameters based on Effective Field Theories and Mathematical Models. This allows us to explore anomalies in the flavor sector, using as well as amplitude methods. We also contribute to understanding the role of particle physics in the early universe with data related to gravitational waves and dark matter.

We…