Ethan Cascio

We will begin with a brief overview of radiation effects in electronics, and their effect on reliability. Then we will cover the history of the discovery and our growing awareness of them, with special attention paid to the place of the Harvard Cyclotron Laboratory (HCL)/Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Rad Test program in that history. We will then look at what factors made HCL so prominent in the early work of understanding these effects, and why the re-purposing of equipment built at HCL for the MGH program was particularly useful in electronics reliability testing. Finally, we will finish with a few words on the future of the MGH test program.

Biography:

Ethan Cascio joined the staff of the Harvard Cyclotron Laboratory (HCL) in 1985 after receiving his BA in Physics from Reed college. Over the next 17 years at HCL he worked on both the joint project to develop proton therapy in collaboration with Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and the radiation effects testing program at HCL. He eventually became Operations Manager of the lab and primarily responsible for the radiation effects program. When Harvard closed HCL in 2002 following the transfer of the clinical treatment programs to the newly built Northeast Proton Therapy Center at MGH (later re-named the Burr Proton Therapy Center) he moved with the project over to MGH and became the Radiation Test Program Manager at the Burr center. At the Burr Center he established and continues to run the radiation test program, as well as provides clinical physics and engineering support for the proton therapy program. He is the author and co-author of numerous papers on the subjects of proton therapy, dosimetry, radiation effects in electronics and proton beamline design and instrumentation.