Dr Helen McNair is the lead research radiographer at the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust and Institute of Cancer Research.
Helen trained at the Northern Ireland School of Therapeutic Radiography in 1986. After working in Australia for two years she returned to the UK and worked in the Westminster Hospital and subsequently at the Royal Marsden Hospital from 1990. During that time, she worked on the treatment Linacs and then in pre-treatment where she gained extensive experience in patient reproducibility and motion in radiotherapy. She moved to Sutton in 2000 to commence her role as research radiographer and completed her PhD in 2011.

Dr McNair was awarded a Health Education England/National Institute for Health Research Senior Clinical Lectureship, commenced April 2019, in the subject area of making ‘real time adaptive radiotherapy’ possible.

Her main area of research is the translation of novel radiotherapy technologies into clinical practice. This has involved investigating the efficacy and efficiency of intensity modulated radiotherapy and Image guided radiotherapy.

Helen has contributed to many national guidelines and most recently co-chaired the National Radiotherapy Implementation Group (NRIG) Image guided radiotherapy group (IGRT) which created guidance on the role and use of IGRT and the subsequent update in 2011-12. She is a member of the teaching faculty of the European Society for Radiotherapy and Oncology (ESTRO) Image Guided Radiotherapy and is a Fellow of the British Institute of Radiology. She is also associate editor of Radiography, the official peer-reviewed journal of the Society and College of Radiographers and the European Federation of Radiographer Societies.

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