Rachel Hachadorian, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor

About Dr. Hachadorian

Rachael Hachadorian, Ph.D., M.Sc., is a board‑certified medical physicist and Lead Physicist at our Encinitas clinic providing day‑to‑day physics support and ensuring rigorous patient‑safety standards for external‑beam treatments. She coordinates the commissioning of advanced quality‑assurance tools and the creation of customized clinical workflows that have markedly improved efficiency and consistency across the department.

Dr. Hachadorian’s doctoral research centers around real-time applications of Cherenkov imaging for breast radiotherapy. Her patented work has demonstrated how CT‑calibrated (Nature Communications, 2020) and SFDI-calibrated (Journal of Biomedical Optics, 2018) Cherenkov light can be used to image radiation dose over the full radiation field (Medical Physics, 2023). She has built upon these techniques by devising a means of predicting under- and over-dosing at the whole breast and nodal field match lines (Radiotherapy and Oncology, 2021). She has also made substantial contributions to the growing field of proton dose-rate studies, advancing double‑scattering FLASH proton beam configurations to increase flexibility and efficiency (Physics in Medicine & Biology, 2024), and exploring potential correlations between varying definitions of dose rate and adverse side effects. Currently, she is investigating low toxicity outcomes and mitigation of radiation-induced side-effects using adaptive radiotherapy tools.

Her early‑career achievements have been recognized with her election as a voting member of the AAPM Global Early‑Career Research Subcommittee (March 2024), the Jack Fowler Young Investigator Abstract Competition award (April 2023), and an Early‑Career Scholarship from the Winter Institute of Medical Physics (February 2024). She was awarded the Dartmouth College John Strohbehn graduate honorarium for research excellence in biomedical engineering (June 2021), won Dartmouth’s 5th Annual Biomedical Research Showcase (April 2019), and was selected for the AAPM Science Council (SCAMP) Fellowship (June 2022).

Beyond her research, Dr. Hachadorian is active in global‑health initiatives through AAPM’s Global Early-Career Research Subcommittee (GECRSC), the HypoAfrica consortium, and mentors undergraduate and graduate trainees in the U.S. and abroad. She is a member of the Board of Associate Editors for AAPM’s Medical Physics Journal, and is also a member of the AAPM State Champions Working group which advances public policy, regulations and legislation relating to Medical Physics. She has a passion for teaching and service that allows her to broaden her impact on patient care and the next generation of medical physicists.