Steve Webb (born 26 November 1948) is a British medical physicist and writer. He is an emeritus professor of physics at the Joint Department of Physics in the
Institute of Cancer Research
The Institute of Cancer Research (the ICR) is a public research institute and a member institution of the University of London in London, United Kingdom, specialising in oncology. It was founded in 1909 as a research department of the Royal Mar ...
and the
Royal Marsden Hospital. He was editor-in-chief of ''
Physics in Medicine and Biology'' for six years, being succeeded in 2011 by Simon Cherry.
Biography
Steve Webb was born and grew up at
Swindon
Swindon () is a town and unitary authority with Borough status in the United Kingdom, borough status in Wiltshire, England. As of the 2021 Census, the population of Swindon was 201,669, making it the largest town in the county. The Swindon un ...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Webb retired in September 2011.
Honors and awards
Webb has been awarded the EFOMP Medal by the
European Federation of Organisations for Medical Physics
The European Federation of Organisations for Medical Physics (EFOMP) was founded in May 1980 in London to serve as an umbrella organisation representing the national Medical Physics societies in Europe. It took just twenty-seven months from the f ...
, the Barclay Medal by the
British Institute of Radiology, an Honorary Fellowship of the Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine, and honorary membership in the ''Deutsche Gesellschaft für Medizinische Physik e.V.'', the German Society for Medical Physics.
List of DMGM Honorary Members
(in German). Retrieved 18 September 2016. In addition, he was awarded the degree of DSc (Med) Honoris Causa by the University of London.
Selected publications
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Notes and references
External links
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Webb, Steve
English physicists
1948 births
Living people
Medical physicists
Royal Marsden Hospital