George Tabatadze was interviewed by WSU Health Sciences Spokane Office of Research about his work at the USTUR. Dr. Tabatadze is an assistant professor at the USTUR, where his work focuses on radiation measurements and associated research. Continue reading to learn about the work conducted at the USTUR, and Dr. Tabatadze’s role in that work.
Researcher on the Rise: Q&A with George Tabatadze
Interview by Judith Van Dongen, reproduced with permission
Original article: https://spokane.wsu.edu/research/news/researcher-on-the-rise-george-tabatadze/
Radiation is used to produce energy, power spacecraft and satellites, and diagnose and treat disease, among other uses. Exposure to radiation comes with safety risks, which are at the heart of the work done by research assistant professor George Tabatadze and his colleagues at the United States Transuranium and Uranium Registries (USTUR), a Tri-Cities-based research unit housed in the WSU College of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences.
We study the biokinetics, dosimetry, and possible biological effects of radioactive elements like plutonium, americium, and uranium within the human body. We do this by studying organs and tissue samples from former U.S. nuclear workers with known radioactive exposure who have voluntarily donated their bodies—or parts of them—after their death. USTUR has a long history that started with the creation, in 1968, of the National Plutonium Registry, which changed its name to U.S. Transuranium Registry two years later. In 1978, the U.S. Uranium Registry was established. Both registries involved multiple labs and organizations at various locations that were working under government contract. In 1992, the two registries merged and became the WSU research unit known as USTUR. All of the work is now done in one central location that is housed close to the former nuclear production complex at Hanford. USTUR has been fully grant funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) since its founding.
We operate in the field of health physics, a profession that emerged during World War II after plutonium was created as a new material for nuclear weapons production. The first health physicists were industrial hygienists and MDs who were in charge of taking care of workers’ health at those facilities. They were the first to notice the effects of radiation, such as skin lesions and blistering at high doses and higher incidence of cancer at lower doses. Here at USTUR, we generate data and science that is used by scientists all over the world and by national and international scientific organizations such as the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) and the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements (NCRP). ICRP and NCRP use our work to develop recommendations for radiation dose limits and to refine models used to measure how radiation dose affects the human body. Those recommendations are used by other agencies such as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the DOE to regulate the use of radiation and limit radiation exposure to workers and the general public.
Physics was my passion always. I got my undergraduate degree in physics and computer science at Tbilisi State University in my home country of Georgia. It was mostly theoretical physics, and I really wanted to focus more on applied science. So I came to the U.S. to pursue a master’s degree in health physics with an emphasis in medical physics at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. There, I completed a research project aimed at understanding how the distribution of alpha-particle-emitting radioactive material in the human body affects bone, one of the organs that is the most sensitive to this type of radiation. After that, I briefly worked in medical physics consulting, visiting hospitals to determine whether their radiation-producing medical equipment met state regulations on radiation emissions. However, my passion was always to do research, and so I pursued a PhD at Idaho State University (ISU) Health Physics Program. ISU had a collaboration with USTUR at the time, and I spent several years working on the ISU/USTUR internal dosimetry team as part of my PhD project before officially joining USTUR in 2014.
I’m in charge of the measurement of radioactive elements in tissue samples, data analysis, and laboratory quality assurance and quality control. Additionally, I use a machine called an autoradiography imager to gain a better understanding of the distribution of different types of radioactive materials in different tissues and organs on a micro scale, as part of my interest in microdosimetry. When we understand the radioactive dose delivered to specific organs or tissues, we can potentially translate that into the risk of developing disease.
One big project I’ve been working on for the past year and a half is developing the USTUR quality assurance program plan. Although health physicists have been measuring radiation dose since the 1940s, advances in technology and our understanding of the data itself provide us with an opportunity to better control the quality of the data we generate.
I have always been fond of human health, and half of my family consists of medical doctors. My current career is the perfect marriage between science, biology, and medicine. I really enjoy helping people by understanding the effects of radiation and contributing to the development of models that will better predict radiation dose to humans.
The almost century-old, million-dollar question is what the effects of low-dose radiation are. The effects of high-dose radiation are well-known from nuclear accidents like the Chernobyl disaster and nuclear bomb survivor studies at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the data on the effects of lower dose radiation is quite uncertain and so spread out that given the same data multiple conflicting conclusions could be drawn. Our work is trying to contribute to filling that gap. What it will take is lots of data to minimize the uncertainty and be able to develop a better model to predict the effects of low doses of radiation.
It’s been really nice to be part of the team here at the USTUR. I’m extremely grateful to my fellow USTUR faculty Sergei Tolmachev, Maia Avtandilashvili, Stacey McComish, Dan Strom, and Martin Šefl, as well as USTUR staff Elizabeth Thomas, Florencio Martinez, and Margo Bedell. We work as a unit and help each other to do better research. As we always say, a few minds are better than one.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
In December, the USTUR mailed its 2023 Registrant newsletter to living Registrants and deceased Registrants’ next of kin. This year’s newsletter included a note from the USTUR’s director, as well as information about the USTUR’s special session at the Health Physics Society’s winter workshop on internal dosimetry; resumption of in-person advisory committee meetings and active inventory of historical NHRTR samples; and background information about the radium studies that were carried out by Argonne National Laboratory and other institutions.
The USTUR has completed its data quality objectives (DQO) document, which addresses the sample collection and data analysis needs in support of the United States Transuranium and Uranium Registries’ (USTUR) mission. The DQO process was originally developed by federal agencies to ensure that data of acceptable completeness and sufficient quality would be available to inform decisions about environmental cleanup. The USTUR generally does not make decisions based on its radiochemical measurement data, but rather uses the data it generates to quantitatively describe the biokinetics of uranium and transuranium elements in the human body. In this document, the USTUR presents its adaptation of the DQO process as described in the Multi-Agency Radiological Laboratory Analytical Protocols (MARLAP, 2004) Manual and American National Standards Institute’s ANSI/ANS-41.5-2012 standard as a key part of its Quality Assurance Project Plan (QAPP). Other parts of the QAPP can be found in other USTUR procedures and documents. The USTUR has chosen to adopt the methodology and terminology of MARLAP insofar as appropriate.
We want to welcome the newest member of the USTUR research faculty, Xirui Liu. Ms. Liu has worked with the USTUR as a student collaborator since 2019, where her research focused on using autopsy reports to determine how often the underlying causes of death found on death certificates are incorrect. Ms. Liu has both a master’s degree in health informatics from Weill Cornell Medicine (2022), and a master’s in public health in international health and development from Tulane University (2021). She also earned her Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery degree from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China in 2017. Ms. Liu will expand her original research to explore how under- and over-classification of diseases on death certificates affects risk estimates in epidemiological studies.
USTUR research assistant professor, Maia Avtandilashvili, and adjunct professor, Daniel Strom, have been selected to serve on the science advisory board that will conduct a peer review of the Environmental Protection Agency’s draft document 