François Bochud received his master degree in physics at EPFL, Lausanne Switzerland, and a PhD in medical image quality at University of Lausanne. During his PhD, he worked part-time as a board-certified medical physicist in a radiation oncology department. He then spent one and a half year at Cedars Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, where he worked on model observers in medical imaging. As he came back to Switzerland, he led the radiation metrology group of the Institute of Radiation Physics at the Lausanne University Hospital, where he was in charge of the primary lab for activity measurement in Switzerland, as well as the secondary lab for dosimetry and activity. Since 2005, he has been the director of this institute and professor of medical physics at the Faculty of Biology and Medicine of Lausanne University. He is currently chairing the Swiss Federal Commission for Radiological Protection and a member of ICRP, Committee 4.
His primary research interest is medical image perception, mainly the development of model observers in radiology. He is also active in the domain of radiation measurements where he contributed to develop new measurement methods in the environment, in CT, in Tomotherapy, and more recently in FLASH radiation therapy. He has also developed innovative theoretical and numerical studies in the field of measurement uncertainty, as well as dose and activity estimations based on numerical Monte Carlo simulations. This has been applied in many medical and non-medical fields like personal dose reconstruction after an incident in a nuclear power plant; dose factor associated to in situ activity measured by gamma spectrometry; calibration of gamma spectrometers. Dr Bochud was elected to the Commission in 2020.