We are very sad to announce that Edward Epp, PhD, former Chief of the Division of Physics in the Mass General Department of Radiation Oncology, has passed away at the age of 92 at his care home in Needham Massachusetts. Dr. Epp completed his BSc and MSc at the University of Saskatchewan under Harold Johns the great pioneer of cobalt therapy. In 1955, he finished his PhD in nuclear physics at McGill University in Montreal and took a position as a medical physicist at the Montreal General Hospital. He soon progressed to Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York City as the Head of their Physical Biology Laboratory. As a Professor of Physics at Cornell, his work studied the radiobiology of bacteria and mammalian cells, demonstrating the role of hypoxia in inducing resistance, and teasing out the underlying radiochemical mechanisms. He performed pioneering work on oxygen depletion with beams of high dose rate, for which there has been a great recent resurgence of interest as FLASH therapy takes the stage. He was recruited by Dr. Suit to become Head of Physics at MGH in 1974 and stayed in that position until his retirement in 1997.
