USTUR research provides vital insights into the behavior of actinides in the human body, and USTUR faculty have been a consistent part of the conversation at both national and international radiation protection conferences. USTUR Director, Sergey Tolmachev, chaired a session on radionuclide decorporation agents and chelation therapy at the 2025 Radiation Research Society meeting and delivered a talk on a USTUR study involving a worker exposed to curium-244. This study is the most extensive work on the biokinetics and distribution of curium-244 in the human body. This is an example of the unique value that USTUR research has for the body of knowledge about actinides in humans. Two posters were also presented. George Tabatadze described the use of the ionizing radiation quantum imaging detector to quantify radium-226 in human bone, and Sara Dumit of Los Alamos National Laboratory summarized biokinetic modeling of plutonium decorporation in a female USTUR Registrant.
USTUR faculty have also been active at other scientific meetings nationally and internationally. Dr. Tolmachev presented a poster emphasizing the importance of human data to actinide research at the International Commission on Radiological Protection’s (ICRP) 8th International Symposium on the System of Radiological Protection. Xirui Liu presented a simulation study on the impact of cause-of-death misclassification in radiation health risk models at both the annual Health Physics Society Meeting and the American Public Health Association Annual Meeting. Maia Avtandilashvili presented the findings of a study that used post-mortem organ measurements to validate a Bayesian approach to modeling dosimetric uncertainty. While biases in recruitment methods prevent the USTUR from directly conducting epidemiological studies, Dr. Avtandilashvili and Ms. Liu’s presentations demonstrate the USTUR’s unique ability to support epidemiological studies by shedding light on the uncertainties that are present in both the doses to workers and the causes of death reported on death certificates.
