The medical physics program, officially established during the 2025-26 academic year, started as a single class offering in by Dr. Mackay Salley ’95 in 2019. It expanded in scope with the arrival of Dr. Solmaz Bastani in 2022. Her research and background made her an ideal leader for the program, and her personal story illustrates why the subject is vitally important.
“THE HOLE IN YOUR HEART”
How cancer shaped Bastani and her research
Bastani, assistant professor, is a physicist by degree and a medical physicist by practice. Her interest in physics began more than two decades ago as a student in her native Iran. Her specialization in medical physics, though, was spurred by two twists of fate.
Bastani left Iran in 2011 to begin her doctoral work in physics at Oklahoma State University. Two years into her work on temperature sensing, Bastani learned that her brother, Barbod, had been diagnosed with esophageal cancer.
“My parents told me he had a stomachache and was going to the hospital for stomach issues,” she says. “I asked his wife how he was doing. She said, ‘He’s doing good. He just came back from chemotherapy.’ I was like, ‘Chemotherapy? What?’”
Bastani says esophageal cancer is not as lethal as many other forms of cancer if it is detected early, but Barbod’s cancer cells had metastasized to his lungs and his stomach. He died in October 2014.
“When I left my country, I always thought in the back of my mind that there might be one of my parents I might never see again. I never thought it would be my brother,” Bastani says.
Bastani says she and Barbod — a medical doctor who specialized in toxicology — were “180 degrees opposite” of one another in terms of their personalities, but they were still close.
“When I was in the U.S., we talked almost every week,” she says. She remembers Barbod as a shy but selfless servant who, during his residency, went above and beyond to care for employees of an oil company on the border of Iraq and Iran. Many of those workers’ families attended Barbod’s funeral, but Bastani could not because of the complex visa process to return to the United States.
“I could not do research for four months. I didn’t go to classes. I was a mess,” she says. “I went through all the stages of mourning. You eventually learn to live with the hole in your heart.”
Dr. Jongmin Cho’s arrival at Oklahoma State gave Bastani’s pain purpose. A board-certified medical physicist, Cho’s research involved helping doctors remove cancer cells from patients with a low prognosis of remission. Bastani began working with Cho to investigate cellular uptake of gold nanoparticles by lung cancer cells for use in diagnostic imaging and therapeutic treatment. Her research at Wofford is similar but uses non-radioactive quantum dots — semiconductor particles synthesized on the scale of nanometers. When UV light shines on them, they begin to glow, helping doctors and surgeons identify cancerous cells to better extract them.
“For many cancers, if you want to completely heal the patient, you have to remove all of the cancer cells, because otherwise they can come back,” Bastani says. “Our big question is how do we make these cells accept the quantum dots as much as possible? Because the more quantum dots we can put inside the cells, the more clear of an image we have and the better we can eradicate the cancer.”
FROM CLASS TO PROGRAM
Wofford’s Department of Physics added a medical physics course to their Fall 2019 schedule. Salley, professor of physics, developed the course, made connections within the local medical community and taught the first two offerings.
Wofford has such a big group of pre-med students each year,” Salley recalls. “We thought it would be worth testing the waters to see if there was interest, both for physics majors and for majors in biology or chemistry.”
Wilson Oswald ’22 was a student in the first class.
“That classroom was full,” says Oswald, a radiation therapy physics resident at the Medical University of South Carolina. The class opened a door for him.
Oswald decided to pursue a role in clinical radiation therapy, earning a master’s degree in medical physics from Duke University this year. He says his liberal arts education provided key interpersonal skills to thrive as a therapy medical physicist.
“There are so many roles involved in cancer therapy, and the physicist consults with all of them. To work in the clinic, you really need to be a good communicator,” Oswald says. “We take that seriously at Wofford. This is a good place to send out well-rounded medical physicists.”
Another student in the first class was Andrew White ’22, a therapy medical physics resident at Northwestern University who will begin a medical physicist position with Atrium Health in July. He was intrigued by engineering and medicine as a Wofford student, but he knew he didn’t want to go to medical school.
“It wasn’t until the medical physics course my sophomore year that I found that perfect unison between the two. I saw how I could apply engineering to patient care,” he says.
White, who earned his master’s in medical physics at the University of Wisconsin, battled a rare form of cancer in high school called nodular lymphocyte-predominant Hodgkin lymphoma and has been cancer-free since 2014. Now he hopes to help others in their fight. At Wofford, White completed undergraduate research through a fellowship with the American Association of Physicists in Medicine, working on a device designed to measure radiation in 3D and improve the accuracy of cancer treatments.
Salley says the course was designed with graduate-level material to prepare students for these types of opportunities. Topics include radiation therapy, ionizing radiation and radiation safety, magnetic resonance imaging, ultrasound, imaging metrics and computed tomography.
Site visits gave students a real-world look at those topics. With the help of David Vassy, a retired medical physicist in Spartanburg who continues to assist Wofford, Salley arranged for visits to Gibbs Cancer Center, where students got to see specialized radiation equipment like a Cyberknife linear accelerator that many hospitals don’t have.
Salley developed relationships with other professionals to give students the opportunity to see topics applied outside of cancer treatment, such as in OB/GYN clinics, in orthopedic surgery units and in an oral surgery room.
“No cancer center will let you take 200 students on a day that they have patients,” Bastani says. “The beauty of small class sizes is I can easily take 12 students, so they get more exposure to hands-on observation.”
However, there was one missing component to creating something bigger than a course: hands-on research. When Bastani was hired by Wofford in 2022, her quantum dot research and the expertise she could lend students made her and Salley consider expanding the scope of medical physics education at Wofford beyond one course.
“We decided to propose it as a full program,” Salley says. “We worked really hard to communicate to the biology and chemistry departments what the students would need to take to be prepared for graduate school, and they were super gracious in allowing our students to take classes they might not have been able to take if they weren’t in this program.”
White, who met Bastani during her faculty application process, was invited to speak to this year’s class via video call. He looked at the syllabus, heard from the students and understood the depth and quality of education they were receiving from Bastani.
“She’s done a really phenomenal job with transforming what Dr. Salley created,” White says. “The original class was great and got me interested in the field, but now she’s really taken it to the next level. It’s structured like a graduate-level course in terms of the content she’s covering.”
Meet class of 2026 medical physics program graduates
Andrew Botros ’26
Myrtle Beach, S.C.
Biology and finance major
Botros was the odd one out in this year’s medical physics course: “Everyone else was a physics major, and I was the only biology major,” he says.
Botros knew before he came to Wofford that he wanted to enter a medical field. Distinctive experiences in college solidified his decision, including research with a VA Medical Center, an internship with OrthoSC and work on a demographic medical study as a Bonner Scholar with St. Luke’s Free Medical Clinic. He says site visits during the class helped him relate to people working in the field.
“I enjoyed the interaction we had with the physicians,” Botros says. “Hearing how they use the science we have learned and understanding how it impacts the patients for the better was heartwarming.”
Botros plans to attend medical school with the hope of working in orthopedics. His first role after graduation is a position in a drug abuse research training fellowship at the Medical University of South Carolina this fall.
Rory Miller ’26
Greenville, S.C.
Physics major
A conversation with a medical physicist at his home church put the field on Miller’s radar. It just so happened that was the same year Bastani was hired.
“She taught my first physics course, and she helped me understand what medical physics is, how it can help people and what its opportunities were,” Miller says.
Miller aided Bastani in her research, then helped compare two forms of radiation as an AAPM DREAM Fellow at the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix. He most recently was selected to attend the SUPERS research program at University of Pennsylvania, where he worked with a professor researching FLASH therapy, a developing treatment method poised to be more safe and effective than current radiation therapy. Minimizing harm and helping others is Miller’s “why.”
“There’s an immediate impact in this field,” says Miller, who will pursue a master’s degree in medical physics at Louisiana State University this fall. “After you finish schooling, you can begin helping save people’s lives. That’s an amazing thing.”
Alex Wall ’26
Greenville, S.C.
Physics major and mathmatics minor
When Wall took the medical physics course, he was set on engineering. “This class flipped my whole idea of what I wanted to do,” he says. “It took everything I learned in physics and applied it in a way that was more interesting.”
Wall recalls going into Gibbs Cancer Center and seeing the size of linear accelerators and the strength of an MRI machine. “Someone held a metal ball pretty far away, and it was still pulled toward the magnet. Seeing those effects in action was amazing,” he says.
Wall will pursue a master’s degree in medical physics at Virginia Commonwealth University this fall. He then plans to find a related residency so that he can work as a clinical medical physicist.
“One of the main reasons I’m drawn to it is the ability to help people directly. It’s more impactful to me than working on something like a building design,” Wall says.