Tahir Yusufaly, PhD

Dr. Tahir Yusufaly is an Assistant Professor of Radiological Physics in the Russell H. Morgan Department of Radiology and Radiological Sciences at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

His career has moved across multiple areas of quantitative biology and medicine, beginning with a PhD in theoretical biological physics from Rutgers University in 2014, followed by postdoctoral work in bioinformatics, systems biology, and medical physics. At Johns Hopkins, his research has increasingly focused on radiopharmaceutical therapy as an interdisciplinary nexus for bringing together his interests in physics, biology, computation, and patient-centered cancer care.

His current research centers on Computational Nuclear Oncology, a framework for using scientific machine learning, mechanistic modeling, and uncertainty quantification to make radiopharmaceutical therapies more personalized, interpretable, and effective. He has published across physics, radiobiology, imaging, and nuclear medicine, with research support and recognition from organizations including SNMMI and AWS. His current projects span multiple levels of biological organization, from single-cell radiation response and DNA damage modeling to patient-specific RPT dosimetry and normal-organ toxicity prediction. Across these efforts, a recurring theme is the development of models that can learn from clinical and preclinical data while retaining enough mechanistic structure to support explanation, extrapolation, and decision-making.

• Adam DP*, Yusufaly T*, et al. "Parameterizable salivary gland model for small-scale Monte Carlo radiopharmaceutical therapy dosimetry: evaluation of mouse and human model." Physics in Medicine & Biology (in press, 2026). [*co-first authors].
• Yusufaly T, Roncali E, Brosch-Lenz J, et al. "Computational Nuclear Oncology Toward Precision Radiopharmaceutical Therapies: Current Tools, Techniques, and Uncharted Territories." Journal of Nuclear Medicine (2025). [This was selected as a 2025 EJNMMI Highlight.
• Yusufaly TI, Zou J, Nelson TJ, et al. "Improved Prognosis of Treatment Failure in Cervical Cancer with Nontumor PET/CT Radiomics." Journal of Nuclear Medicine 63(7):1087–1093 (2022).