Current Trainees
Rohith Kaiyum, MSc, PhD Student
Rohith finished his BSc with Honours at University of Toronto, Mississauga in 2018, with a Major in Health Sciences Biology and a Minor in Mathematical Sciences. Interested in pursuing a career as a Medical Physicist, Rohith joined Professor Ozzy Mermut’s lab at York University in 2019, and completed his Master’s Thesis, titled “Role of Water in Radiochromic LiPCDA Monomer Crystal Packing and Radiotherapy Dose Response”, under co-supervision of Professor Mermut and Dr. Rink in 2021. He is continuing his PhD in the same lab and under the same co-supervision, looking into incorporating a dye into a radiochromic coating for the purposes of optical self-calibration and further investigating the role of diacetylene monomer crystal packing on various dosimetry related parameters.
Rohith Kaiyum, Msc
Ruiyan Ni, BSc, PhD Student
Ruiyan comes to the Rink lab after completing her undergraduate studies at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University in 2020 with a BSc in Biomedical Engineering. Interested in eventually pursuing a career as a Medical Physicist, she has joined us in 2021. Co-supervised by Dr. Benjamin Haibe-Kains, Ruiyan is working on a deep learning (DL) model that autosegments organs at risk and targets for MR-guided high dose-rate (HDR) brachytherapy for cervical cancer. To date, she has integrated an inverse-square law-based loss function to help guide the model’s attention during training to areas near the target, as well as information from clinical exam using a large language model (LLM) to improve segmentation accuracy or high-risk clinical target volume.
Ruiyan Ni, BSc
Madeline Rapley, BSc, MSc Student
Madeline graduated from Lakehead University with a Bachelor of Science in Physics, with a concentration in Biomedical Physics, in 2024. She joined the Medical Biophysics Department in 2024 and the Rink Lab in January of 2025. Her MSc project involves investigating alternative methods to 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography (FDG-PET) using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). She is focusing her approach on using exogenous glucose analogues with a technique called chemical exchange saturation transfer (CEST), investigating this approach for use in cervical cancer models.
Madeline Rapley, BSc
Caleb Thompson, BSc BEng, MSc Student
Caleb completed his Bachelor of Engineering Sciences and Bachelor of Science (Dual Degree Program) at Western University, graduating with distinction in 2024. He commenced his Master’s in Medical Biophysics in the 2024, joining our lab. His project involves building a deep learning (DL) model that can take ulabeled magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) datasets to create a foundational model for downstream tasks related to optimizing high dose-rate (HDR) brachytherapy for locally advanced cervical cancer patients.
Caleb Thompson, BESc BSc
Rachel L. Shum, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow
Dr. Rachel L. Shum joined the lab in March of 2025, after completing her PhD in late 2024 in Polymer and Materials Chemistry at Queen’s University, where she researched antimicrobial smudge-resistant polymer coatings. Prior to that, she has completed her BSc with Honours in Chemistry at McMaster University, and her MSc in Molecular Science at the Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson). Dr. Shum is currently working on investigating how the side groups of diacetylene molecules affect crystal packing parameters, as well as their sensitivity to ionizing radiation, spectral characteristics, and polymerization kinetics.
Rachel L. Shum, PhD
Past Trainees
Jillian Bennett, MSc
Jill Bennett joined the Rink Lab in 2021 after completing a BSc with Honours in Physics at Queen’s University. A recipient of many awards and accolades during her two-year graduate program, which she finished in 2023, Jill worked on automatic optimization of catheter positions for transperenial implant in high-dose rate (HDR) brachytherapy for locally advanced cervical cancer patients.
Jillian Bennett, MSc
Christopher Schruder, PhD
Christopher completed his BSc with Honours in Chemical Physics at the University of Toronto in 2010. Under co-supervision of Drs. Pietro and Organ at the Department of Chemistry, University of York, he has completed his PhD thesis titled “Silica Sol-Gel Materials as a Catalyst Support for Use in a Microwave-Assisted Continuous-flow Organic Synthesis System”. In 2019, he joined Professor Mermut’s lab as a postdoctoral fellow, and in 2020 the Rink Lab under co-supervision. His project here included working on a hollow-core multiplexing solution for radiochromic optical fibre dosimeters, which he wrapped up in 2022.
Christopher Schruder, PhD