Paula Petti, PhD. Director of Gamma Knife Physics

Board certified in therapeutic radiological physics, Paula Petti, PhD joined the Taylor McAdam Bell Neuroscience Institute as director of Gamma Knife Physics in 2007. Her areas of expertise include: stereotactic radiosurgery, charged-particle radiation therapy, Monte Carlo calculations, as well as particle and photon dose calculations.

Before joining the Institute, Dr. Petti was an associate adjunct professor at the University of California, San Francisco. She also served as clinical medical physicist for the University of California Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.

Dr. Petti has extensive experience in treatment planning and quality assurance for various radiosurgery and radiotherapy technologies, including the Gamma Knife. In addition, she has been responsible for commissioning and maintaining treatment planning software for external beam radiation therapy, as well as quality assurance and dosimetric measurements for linear accelerators.

With more than 100 peer-reviewed articles and abstracts in academic and professional publications, Dr. Petti often shares her expertise regionally, nationally and internationally at events such as the World Congress on Medical Physics. She has been principal and co-investigator for various research awards and grants and is a member of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine.

Dr. Petti received her master’s and doctoral degrees in physics from Harvard University and performed her post-doctoral fellowship in medical physics at the Harvard Medical School Joint Center for Radiation Therapy.

About Washington hospital

Washington Hospital, located in Fremont, California, was the first hospital in the United States to treat patients using the new Leksell Gamma Knife Perfexion™, a revolutionary alternative to traditional open-brain surgery and/or daily radiation treatments, which are administered from four to six weeks. The Gamma Knife Perfexion instead uses focused doses of radiation without making a single incision to treat malignant and benign brain tumors in a matter of hours.

Washington Hospital's Gamma Knife® Program is led by one of the most accomplished teams of specialized physicians, physicists and nurses. Medical Directors neurosurgeon Sandeep Kunwar, MD, and radiation oncologist David Larson, MD, PhD, are both nationally and internationally recognized for their expertise, innovation and leadership in the field of Gamma Knife radiosurgery. Both board certified physicians, together they have more than 23 years of experience performing thousands of successful procedures.