1. Home
  2. People

Michelle E. Howard, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Radiation Oncology

Current Positions

  • Assistant Professor of Radiation Oncology

Education

  • BS in Physics, North Park University, Chicago, Illinois, United States
  • PhD in Biomedical Engineering and Physiology, Mayo Clinic Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, Rochester, Minnesota, United States
  • Radiation Oncology in Clinical Medical Physics, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, United States

Graduate Program Affiliations

Research Interests

  • Increasing the therapeutic ratio of conventional radiotherapy
  • Relative Biological Effectiveness of Particle therapy

Licenses & Certifications

  • American Board of Radiology – Therapeutic Medical Physics
  • Authorized Medical Physicist, LDR/HDR Brachytherapy – State of Iowa, Department of Public Health

Selected Publications

  • Howard ME, Denbeigh JM, Debrot EK, Garcia DA, Remmes NB, Herman MG, Beltran CJ. Dosimetric Assessment of a High Precision System for Mouse Proton Irradiation to Assess Spinal Cord Toxicity. Radiat Res. 2021 Jun 1;195(6):541-548. doi: 10.1667/RADE-20-00153.1. PMID: 33826742.
  • King SA, Solst SR, Graham CH, Fiore LZ, Rheem R, Tomanek-Chalkley A, Fath MA, Caster JM, Spitz DR, Howard ME. Additive Effects of Cu-ATSM and Radiation on Survival of Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma Cells. Radiat Res. 2024 Nov 4. doi: 10.1667/RADE-24-00076.1. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 39492578.
  • Solst SR, Mapuskar KA, Graham CH, King SA, Rheem R, Current K, Allen BG, Caster JM, Spitz DR, Howard ME. Rapid Peroxide Removal Limits the Radiosensitization of Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma (DIPG) Cells by Pharmacologic Ascorbate. Radiat Res. 2023 Nov 1;200(5):456-461. doi: 10.1667/RADE-23-00006.1. PMID: 37758035; PMCID: PMC10759934.
  • Zhou, Q., Howard, M. E., Tu, X., Zhu, Q., Denbeigh, J. M., Remmes, N. B., Herman, M. G., Beltran, C. J., Yuan, J., Greipp, P. T., Boughey, J. C., Wang, L., Johnson, N., Goetz, M. P., Sarkaria, J. N., Lou, Z. & Mutter, R. W. (2021). Inhibition of ATM induces hypersensitivity to proton irradiation by upregulating toxic end joining. Cancer Research. DOI: 10.1158/0008-5472.CAN-20-2960. PMID: 33597272.
  • Howard, M. E., Denbeigh, J. M., Remmes, N. B., Debrot, E. K., Herman, M. G. & Beltran, C. J. (In Press). A high precision method for in vitro proton irradiation. International Journal of Particle Therapy.
  • Howard, M. E., Herman, M. G. & Grams, M. P. (2020). Methodology for radiochromic film analysis using FilmQA Pro and ImageJ. PloS one 15 (5) e0233562. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0233562. PMID: 32437474. PMCID: PMC7241712.
  • Howard, M. E., Beltran, C., Anderson, S., Tseung, W. C., Sarkaria, J. N. & Herman, M. G. (2018). Investigating Dependencies of Relative Biological Effectiveness for Proton Therapy in Cancer Cells. International journal of particle therapy 4 (3) 12-22. DOI: 10.14338/IJPT-17-00031.1. PMID: 30159358. PMCID: PMC6110616.
  • Howard, M., Beltran, C., Sarkaria, J. & Herman, M. G. (2017). Characterization of relative biological effectiveness for conventional radiation therapy: a comparison of clinical 6 MV X-rays and 137Cs. Journal of Radiation Research 58 (5) 608-613. DOI: 10.1093/jrr/rrx018. PMID: 28444207. PMCID: PMC5737853.
  • Courneyea, L., Mullins, J., Howard, M., Foote, R., Garces, Y., Ma, D., Beltran, C., Brinkmann, D. & Pafundi, D. (2015). Positioning reproducibility with and without rotational corrections for 2 head and neck immobilization systems. Practical radiation oncology 5 (6) e575-81. DOI: 10.1016/j.prro.2015.05.003. PMID: 26169225.
  • Howard, M., Beltran, C., Mayo, C. S. & Herman, M. G. (2014). Effects of minimum monitor unit threshold on spot scanning proton plan quality. Medical Physics 41 (9) 091703. DOI: 10.1118/1.4892057. PMID: 25186378.