Ryosuke Kita joined the EORTC as a Medical Fellow in October 2023. He received his Medical Degree from Kyushu University in Japan. After finishing training in general surgery, he worked as an upper gastrointestinal surgeon, particularly focusing on the treatment of oesophageal cancer and gastric cancer. He spent a year and a half at the headquarters of Japan Clinical Oncology Group (JCOG) learning clinical research methodology and working as a study coordinator. During his stay at the EORTC, he will be involved in a collaborative project between EORTC and JCOG in the field of gastrointestinal cancers.

Volha Hertsyk is a Belarusian professional who holds an advanced master’s degree in medical physics earned through the collaborative program of IAEA, ICTP and University of Trieste in Italy. Her career began as a technician in the radiotherapy department at the National Cancer Centre of Belarus, where she later advanced to the role of engineer. Her responsibilities included linac’s simple troubleshooting, treatment planning and quality assurance program creation. Furthermore, she gained two years of clinical experience in two different Italian hospitals with such duties as routine linac QA, treatment planning, and reviewing quality assurance documentation. She joined EORTC in September 2023 to become a part of the RTQA family and collaborate on the constantly evolving process for radiotherapy quality improvement.

Maria Chiara Lo Greco joined the EORTC in September 2023 as a Radiotherapy Quality Assurance Fellow. She is Italian and holds a master’s degree in medicine and surgery that she obtained at the University of Catania in 2020. In 2021, she started her Radiation Oncology residency at the University Hospital “G. Martino” of Messina, where she had the chance to deepen her knowledge of clinical oncology, multidisciplinary approaches, and advanced radiotherapy techniques. During her studies, she showed a keen interest in pediatric oncology and clinical research hence, she decided to apply for the research fellowship offered by the QUARTET project. During her stay at the EORTC, she will be involved in some QUARTET-affiliated trials and research projects, mostly related to pediatric soft tissue sarcoma and brain tumours.

Luc Boone was born in Belgium and holds a master’s degree in Biostatistics obtained at KU Leuven. He started working at the EORTC department of statistics as a research fellow at the beginning of 2022.

Prior to working at the EORTC, he worked as a statistician for the Flemish Department of Health.

Luc Describes himself as an open and outgoing person. He enjoys any type of sports activity.

Luigi Lim joined the EORTC in December 2022 as a hybrid fellow in Quality of Life and Biostatistics. He obtained his Bachelor’s degree in Statistics from the University of the Philippines. After that, he pursued his Master of Statistics and Data Science (Specialization: Biostatistics) at Hasselt University in Belgium with the support of the VLIR-UOS Scholarship. Previously, Luigi worked at the Central Bank of the Philippines where he studied and developed models pertaining to systemic risk.

Luigi will be working on the CATAPULT (Cancer Clinical Trials Pooling of Quality of Life Data) project to validate several objectives, which includes the prognostic value of baseline QoL and change scores using a user-ready independent HRQoL database on the QLQ-C30. He will also be involved in the FDA qualification project, SISAQOL, improving compliance and analysis of RCTs.

Peggy Giasafaki joined the EORTC at the end of February 2022 as a fellow in Biostatistics. She obtained his BSc in mathematics at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and she holds a Master of Statistics from Athens University of Economics and Business. She has worked as Credit Risk Analyst in a Greek company, where she carried out projects about validation of Credit Scoring models via Statistical methods and techniques for Romanian Financial Institutions. Her research project as a Fellow in the Statistics Department at EORTC will be focused on meta-analysis for the GI group.

Debaleena Sain joined EORTC as a Fellow Statistician on April 2022. She is from India and holds a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in Statistics from University of Calcutta and Presidency University, respectively. She completed her PhD in Applied Statistics from University of California, Riverside, U.S.A., where her research was focused on time-varying joint modelling of longitudinal and time-to-event data. At EORTC, she will work with the Brain Tumour Group

Ridwan Oyebayo Olaniran is a Nigerian statistician with a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in statistics from the University of Ilorin, Ilorin, Nigeria (UNILORIN), as well as a PhD in statistics from the Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia. He worked on the development and application of Bayesian random forest for cancer classification, as well as predicting tumor sizes and survival in cancer patients, in his PhD thesis.

In January 2022, he began working as a biostatistician fellow at the EORTC, where he collaborates on research initiatives with the MINDACT Breast Cancer Group (BCG). He worked as a Biostatistician at the Department of Statistics, Faculty of Physical Sciences, University of Ilorin before joining EORTC. Ridwan is passionate about using current and precise statistical methods to improve the lives of cancer patients all over the world.

Dr. Daniel Portik joined the EORTC in May 2022 as an Emmanuel van der Schueren Radiotherapy Quality Assurance Fellow. Daniel received his medical degree at George Emil Palade University of Medicine, Pharmacy, Science, and Technology of Târgu Mureş (UMPhST), Romania. He has participated in several exchange programs in countries like Hungary, Indonesia and Sweden. He finished his radiation oncology training at the ‘Prof.Dr.Ion Chiricuta’ Oncology Institute, Cluj-Napoca, Romania in 2019. During his stay at EORTC Daniel will analyse the radiotherapy quality assurance for H&N trials such as EORTC 1420 ‘Best of’ and the EORTC-1219 DAHANCA trials. With a strong interest in the oligometastatic disease, he will participate in the RTQA of the ongoing EORTC 1702 HALT trial. Likewise, he will also assist in the development and testing of knowledge-based planning models within EORTC. Daniel’s fellowship is supported by the Kom op Tegen Kanker foundation.