Carmen Villagrasa

Carmen Villagrasa graduated in Fundamental Physics at the University of Paris Saclay (France) in 2000 and obtained the Spanish equivalent diploma from the university of Valencia, Spain in 2001. She did her PhD thesis at the Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique (CEA, France), on the measurement of residual nuclei produced by p + Fe spallation reactions, which she defended in 2003. After a post-doc at the Institute for Reactor Safety in the Forschungzentrum Karlsruhe, (Germany), she joined the Institute for Radiation Protection and Nuclear Security in France (IRSN) where she has been working since 2006, first as a researcher in the ionizing radiation dosimetry laboratory and, since 2017 as the head of the laboratory. She is an active member of EURADOS (WG6, Computational Dosimetry) since 2007, and currently Task leader for the Task on Micro- and Nanodosimetry. She has more than ten years of experience in the study of ionising radiation interaction mechanisms with biological targets (DNA in particular) for the calculation of early biological damages using Monte Carlo methods. The main objective of her research is to improve risk models related to healthy tissue exposure to different ionising radiation qualities in the frame of medical applications, space radiation or low dose exposures. To do so, a mechanistical approach is followed aiming to describe the physical and chemical radiation-induced processes at the base of the earliest biological damage. Related to this same subject, IRSN participated in the ‘BioQuaRT’ project (JRP-SIB06; 2012-2015) where she was in charge of one work package dealing with the multiscale simulation development. This preceding work has allowed IRSN to develop specific skills and research techniques in the field of simulation tools for the evaluation of radiation-induced initial DNA damage based on the use of the Geant4-DNA MC code and different geometrical designs of the DNA molecule. She is also a member of the Geant4 and the Geant4-DNA collaborations.