Dr. Tryggestad was educated and trained as an experimental nuclear physicist at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL) at Michigan State University. There, he conducted purely academic research involving, for example, the search for a higher-lying, collective dipole excitation (known as the Giant Dipole Resonance) in an exotic isotope of oxygen, 20O. Following his time at MSU he accepted a two-year post-doctoral fellowship at the Institut de Physique Nucleaire (IPN) d’Orsay, in Orsay, France. At IPN he conducted academic research in the nuclear structure and reactions group (NESTER); his principle project involved probing the resonant structure of the 9He using the (d,p) reaction on 8He.

It was during his time in France that he decided that medical physics would better suit his interests. He was drawn to the field for several reasons, for example, because of its multi-disciplinary tradition and also the more tangible benefit that research and development in medical physics provides to society. Upon his return to the States, he sought out and was offered a post-doctoral fellowship under Dr. John Wong’s mentorship at Johns Hopkins.

During his time as a fellow, Dr. Tryggestad contributed in our NIH-supported effort to build a novel, image-guided small-animal irradiator (SARRP); meanwhile, clinically, he played a leadership role in developing and implementing our program for breath-hold RT delivery (using Elekta’s Active Breathing Coordinator), which developed and fostered his broader interest in understanding and controlling respiratory motion.

Dr. Tryggestad accepted an Instructorship position in July of 2006. His clinical roles as an instructor involve the technical management of our Gamma Knife radiosurgery service and co-management of our external beam radiotherapy program. His experiences with respiratory gating will soon be applied in the context of extra-cranial radiosurgery, as our department will soon have linac IGRT capabilities.

His current research projects involve the development and commissioning of a Monte-Carlo based treatment planning capability and radiation targeting strategies for the aforementioned small-animal irradiator. The principle aim of this work is to bridge the technological gap that exists between the crude laboratory animal irradiation practices and current radiation therapy techniques used in humans. Explicitly stated, the goal is to develop the capability to deliver conformal, image-guided radiation therapies to small animals. Dr. Tryggestad has a general interest in applying this device to questions pertaining to normal tissue toxicity in mice and/or rats, and will also play a co-investigatory role in future studies to look at radiation and combined drug-radiation therapies in the context of various animal cancer models.

Dr. Tryggestad is a junior member of the AAPM.