Dr. John Floberg, who earned his MD and PhD in medical physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and completed his radiation oncology residency at Washington University in St. Louis, joined the Department of Human Oncology as an assistant professor in August.
He will devote his clinical effort to the evaluation and treatment of patients with genitourinary cancers. On the research front, he will focus primarily on the use of imaging findings to help direct treatment.
“In recent years there has been an explosion of new functional and biological imaging information for prostate cancer,” Floberg says. “There are many ways to extract data from that imaging, with the potential to improve how exactly we treat individual patients in different scenarios. There are many exciting research opportunities in this space.”
Dr. Floberg developed an interest in medicine and medical physics as an undergraduate physics major at Carleton College. While there, he visited the Medical Physics Department at UW–Madison, where one of his mentors studied. He considered going into either diagnostic radiology or radiation oncology when he was working toward his MD and PhD. “I chose radiation oncology because it felt like a better clinical fit for me,” he says. “I like having direct interactions with patients more consistently.”
The move to Madison is a homecoming for Dr. Floberg and his family—his wife, Kristen, and their children, James, 5 and Marta, 2. In addition to completing his MD and PhD degrees in Madison, his wife, Kristen, an occupational therapist, is from Madison. Her parents live in Madison as well.
In his spare time, Dr. Floberg enjoys wilderness canoeing, backpacking, hiking, bicycling, cross-country skiing, swimming, playing guitar and gardening. He had led multiple-week canoeing trips in Northern Minnesota and the Canadian subarctic and arctic—the kind of trips where you’re dropped off in a remote area by plane and paddle downriver for up to six weeks.
For the past several years, residency and young children have left little time for Dr. Floberg for some of these pursuits. “My wife and I like outdoor activities. It will be nice to do wilderness camping trips again,” he says. “We’re slowly getting back into that.”