Particle Therapy International Masterclass: the first Italian experience

For the first time, Italy participated in the International Particle Therapy Masterclass, a training event promoted by the International Particle Physics Outreach Group, with the purpose to bring students of the last year of High School closer to physics applied to medicine, showing them the importance of basic research and its impact on society, in particular, on human health. The event was organized as follow. The morning was dedicated to seminaries devoted to explanation of artificial radionuclides production for theranostics application in Nuclear Medicine; to the radiotherapy carried out with different external beams, with an in-depth discussion and debate about the strengths and weaknesses that each technique presents; to a virtual visit to the Italian National Center for Oncological Adrotherapy in Pavia (CNAO). In the afternoon, the students participated to a hand-on session with the use of MatRad s/w, developed and used by German Cancer Research Center DKFZ in Heidelberg. The students realized a real treatment plan to treat tumors of specific organs with different particle beams (photons, protons, carbon ions). Finally, they presented their results in an international virtual meeting organized at CERN with the students of the other participant institutes around the world and in the presence of experts. In this contribution, this rich and stimulating experience which made “researchers” for one day twenty-two students selected from different schools in Lombardy and Calabria Italian regions, will be presented.