Benjamin Page

Background

I completed my MPhys at the University of Warwick (2018-22) and was awarded the Styles Prize for excellence in the 4th year. My final year project was titled 'Low-Frequency Vibrational Modes of Chlorophyll' and was supervised by Dr Rebecca Milot.

Following graduation, I worked as a trainee patent attorney in an intellectual property firm based in Birmingham. I began my PhD in October 2023 under the supervision of Professor Emma MacPherson.

Research

My research focuses on using terahertz (THz) light as a medical imaging modality to distinguish between healthy and diseased skin.

The main benefits of THz light are that it is non-ionising, non-invasive, and highly water-sensitive. One way in which healthy and diseased tissue vary is in their water content; cancerous tissue, for example, has a significantly greater water content due to its upregulated metabolism. Sensitivity to changes in water content may allow us to distinguish between tissue types and identify cancerous regions quickly and effectively.

As part of my PhD, I work in collaboration with the University of Leeds, the University of Exeter and University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire (UHCW) on the TERABOTICS project. The aim of this project is to take in vivo clinical THz images of patients with basal cell carcinomas (BCCs), with the overall goal of cancer margin detection. Further to this, my work involves computational modelling of biological systems, such as the skin, to inform real-world data analysis and to better understand the contrast mechanisms at play during in vivo measurements.