What is your current position?

I’m in training to become a clinical oncologist (in Denmark you are trained in both medical and radiation oncology). I am roughly halfway through the five-year specialist training at Aarhus University Hospital. Having just returned from paternity leave, I’m currently working in a team that treats lung cancer and melanoma.

What is your educational background?

While working in the oncology department of Aalborg University Hospital at the same time as going to medical school, I knew my professional path was going to be oncology. After I had graduated in 2016 and completed my mandatory internship, I started my residency in oncology at my current workplace in Aarhus in 2017. I was fortunate to join the head-and-neck cancer team early in my career. This opened my eyes to the world of radiation oncology, which I have found profoundly interesting ever since. Here I also met my academic father, Professor Jesper Grau Eriksen. He took me under his wing and we embarked on planning my PhD project, which I defended this year.

What is your area of research?

While working with head-and-neck cancer patients, I wondered why some tumors responded to radiotherapy, while other tumors or nodal sites did not. Head-and-neck squamous cell carcinomas usually recur in the high-dose radiation. My primary research area is to characterise tumors biologically with the aim of identifying a potential profile that can be used to predict radiosresistance. This was also the primary focus of my PhD thesis. In Denmark, we are privileged to have the Danish Head-and-Neck Cancer (DAHANCA) study group, which is a national collaboration and holds a very large and updated. However, the inspiration behind a research question, its validation and development of the research method, etc., depend on international collaboration. Therefore, ESTRO and the contacts made through ESTRO initiatives are essential to plan any project, as they were for mine.

How long have you been an ESTRO member?

I have been an ESTRO member since 2019 when my interest in radiotherapy was established.

 

What role has ESTRO played in your career?

This question can be answered in three words: inspiration, collaboration and education. The annual ESTRO conference is a big world of inspiration for an early career attendee. The compact presentation of state-of-the-art research is an amazing motivator for professionals. Through different ESTRO initiatives, collaboration across borders is enabled. It doesn’t take much to lay the foundation for future collaboration: a short chat after a presentation, a shared beer in the bar at the young ESTRO (yESTRO) dinner, the random but optimal speed-dating pairing or meeting someone during an ESTRO course. I strive to follow the advice I was given by Jens Overgaard about how to get the most out of attending conferences or courses: “Don’t hang out with folks from your own institution – meet new people at scientific gatherings.” The ESTRO school has a wide range of courses for all early career professionals and they are (disclaimer, I haven’t attended all of them) highly recommended!

What ESTRO activities have you been involved in so far? And in the future, are there some specific missions within the Society that you would like to participate in?

Before I joined the yESTRO committee, I planned a young dinner that hosted 100+ early career professionals during the ESTRO 2022 conference in Copenhagen. This was a success, and after I joined the committee we made it a tradition to host a dinner during each conference. I also co-organised and chaired the Young Track during this year’s conference in Glasgow with Bartek Tomasik.

Before I joined the yESTRO committee, I had been on the committee of the National Society for Young Oncologists in Denmark for several years. During the COVID lockdown, we had great success in organising monthly, post-tuck-in webinars for early career members, where different disease groups were presented in a very hands-on fashion. The concept is still running and still has a broad audience. I am still working on how to expand this concept into ESTRO.

My overall dream of my “personal” academic ESTRO future is to build upon the shoulders of others and expand the search to understand differentiated radiation responses.

Why would you recommend to students and young radiation oncology professionals that they become members of ESTRO?

Because the variety of friendships or professional bonds that can be made through ESTRO is priceless. ESTRO strives to develop you both as a researcher and as a clinician according to gold standards and offers career guidance and mentorship along the way since the conference and ESTRO school courses are invaluable, mostly because ESTRO motivates and facilitates young professionals.

Morten Horsholt Kristensen