Aspiring medical physicist determined to help save lives

Early career scholar: Umi hopes her PhD research will in future translate into everyday clinical practice for beta-thalassaemia patients.

WITH an interest in physics, one can be involved in the medical field, as Umi Nabilah Ismail discovered as a Form Five student. It led to her studying medical physics at the tertiary level as an undergraduate and later, a master’s student.

Now a second year PhD student at Universiti Malaya (UM), she recently won the Early Career Medical Physicists Scholarship Award by the Winter Institute of Medical Physics (WIMP) – a feat her supervisor Prof Ng Kwan Hoong has likened to putting UM on par with MD Anderson Cancer Centre (MDACC) in Houston, Texas, the United States.