Let’s start at the beginning. How did you end up at CAMP?
I was looking for jobs toward the end of my residency at the University of Louisville. Jobs for entry-level physicists were sparse then, much different than the landscape today, but I had interviewed with Ohio State and was waiting for an offer. Dave Pascoe, who was a year ahead of me at the University of Kentucky, was working for CAMP, and I’d been talking with him as well, as I had some interest in moving to the Mountain West. He had passed my CV along to Jerry White even though they didn’t have a job posted formally.
I received a phone call from Jerry on a Friday late in April, where he introduced himself and asked about my residency experience and my interest in CAMP. The following Monday, he reached out to schedule an on-site interview, which I was excited about. Within an hour of setting up the interview, I also received an appealing offer from Ohio State, and they were hopeful for an answer that week.
What to do?! It was early in May, and if you know anything about May in Louisville, you know it is Derby time. So I’ve got the tickets, the hat, the dress, and I’m attending all the various events that lead up to the big event. It’s a busy week, but I called Jerry back, explained the situation, and he was gracious enough to move the interview up. So I got on a plane later that same day, arrived in Denver around midnight, interviewed on Tuesday, and was back on Wednesday in time to watch the Steamboat Races on the Ohio River. I received the offer on Thursday, which I accepted. And the rest is history!
What was CAMP like when you arrived?
CAMP was a smaller group when I arrived; I think there were 13 or so physicists on staff. Jerry and Greg led the group and Mike was semi-retired at that point, but he still plugged in some clinically. CAMP was always very focused on clinical patient care through an innovative approach, and that was the same then as it is today. Also, the original founders had set out to create the jobs they wanted to have, so employee satisfaction was high with strong benefits and work-life balance. This is another thing that we have worked to maintain. We had company-wide in-person dinner meetings every month, which was great to build community but is less feasible now with geography and size of group challenges. Another difference is that there was a lot less business organization, it was very much a group run by physicists, and there were times that employee policies and such were less clear than they are now.
Jerry and Mike retired in 2014. What was that transition like?
The transition began with initial conversations, followed by a dinner discussion between the original founders and the individuals they invited to become new partners. Greg stayed on at the time, and Brad, Jen, Gyongyver, and I joined the partnership as both Mike and Jerry officially retired. Once we all agreed to the transition, we held several meetings and exchanged emails with both our lawyer and accountant to finalize the details. In October of 2014, CAMP, Inc. closed, and CAMP, LLC opened. I suspect many folks didn’t even realize the transition had taken place at the time, as visible changes were gradual and we built on the foundation of CAMP, Inc.
I think a lot has changed, but none of it would have been possible without the foundation laid by Jerry, Greg, and Mike, and really, the name they built for us to start from. We took it and made it a little more organized, brought it up to date with things like a website, company emails, processes, and standardization. I remember looking through the finances and being surprised that we still had a Yellow Pages ad! But the foundation of patient care first, of group mentality and teamwork, of how to support each other within the greater medical physics community – all of that was laid by them, and we’ve worked hard to maintain that culture.
CAMP has been an incredible blessing to me. I met my husband, Brad Lofton, through CAMP and we have three children. That’s one thing that couldn’t have happened without it. From a professional standpoint, Jerry was just a great mentor for me. Without observing how he operated during the first four years I was at CAMP, including how he collaborated with administration, interacted with physicians, and developed relationships with facilities, I’m not sure I would have been able to appropriately support the leadership position I’ve had since. Observing his leadership and how he paved the way was inspiring and I’m grateful to have been able to work under the guidance of Greg and Mike as well. Greg had a remarkable ability to tinker with anything, while Mike was consistently clinical in his approach. I felt fortunate to work in the clinic with the three of them, to learn from how they handled challenging situations and witness how valued and trusted they were in the clinic.
You’ve been in medical physics for 20 years now. What are the biggest changes you’ve seen?
When I started, both in training and in my initial years at CAMP, all the clinics were still utilizing paper for patient charts. By about 2012, we had transitioned to a paperless environment by utilizing the Record and Verify System, and that was a big transition because we had to make sure that patients who were mid-treatment during the switch had appropriate documentation in both systems, and to ensure that we were able to refer back to the previous charts if and when a patient arrived for a re-treatment in the future.
We were also doing IMRT when I started. The IMRT boom was in the early 2000s. However, VMAT was just emerging when I was finishing grad school, and that was a significant development. Now, VMAT is used far more often than static-field IMRT.
However, one concerning thing is that when I first started, most of our patients were 60 or older. And now I’m regularly seeing patients come through who are in their 40s, 30s, even 20s. Every time I go to the clinic, I’m chart-checking at least one of them. That was once such a rarity.
Are there positive changes too?
Absolutely. When I started, we would regularly give whole brain treatment to a patient who had brain mets, and that might buy them a month. It might relieve some symptoms, but it was very palliative care. Now we can target radiation so precisely that when the next met pops up in a few months or in a year, we can target that lesion precisely without over-treating the healthy brain. We’re seeing patients with metastatic diagnoses live significantly longer.
My mom was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2007. She had a recurrence in 2019, and then she had a single metastasis from breast cancer on her left hip. We treated it with radiosurgery, a single fraction, in 2021. To date, her PET scans have been clear. She’s more than four years out from a palliative metastatic stage four diagnosis, and she’s still with us, praise God. It’s been a privilege to be able to walk alongside her in her journey, and it’s allowed me to understand the patient perspective better than I would otherwise have been able, but she’s also a good example of how the improvement in technology is contributing to better outcomes for patients.
With the technology advances we can give patients valuable time that they may not have otherwise had, with reduced side effects in some cases. Fractionations are getting shorter, which allows patients a better treatment experience overall. Additional technology gains are helping us with efficiency, so we can continue to put time toward the things that really matter.
What’s kept you at CAMP for 15 years?
I think it’s the team, the people, and also the flexibility. I’ve been blessed to be able to be part-time since having twins. I’m married to a diagnostic physicist, and we are both able to contribute to the group. That kind of opportunity isn’t everywhere. I think CAMP does value work-life balance, and the ability to spend that extra time in the mountains is unique to the region as well. I’d have a hard time giving up the Colorado sunshine at this point!
Another thing that sets CAMP apart is that it is owned and operated by medical physicists who understand what is valuable to develop and what is not. This expertise has enabled us to establish a peer review program, develop CAMPsight, create CAMP Academy, and contribute to innovative clinical solutions. We recently updated one of our core values to “Value in Innovation” to better reflect this aspect of our group.
We can build whatever we see value in, or we can say, “You know what, that’s not valuable, we’re not going to spend time on that.” We have a lot more control over how we operate clinically as physicists than you might have at a place where you’re reporting directly to a hospital administrator.
What are the major moments or projects that stand out as turning points for you?
You know, it’s hard to pinpoint a specific moment or project. And maybe that’s part of it, right? We’ve really tried to be humble in our leadership. I believe that there are probably decisions I’ve made that have positively impacted patient care. And there are probably mistakes I’ve made along the way as well. Oftentimes it’s the thing you miss that you learn from most, I mean, that’s our job, double-checking things. So you catch things on a plan, you catch things on a chart check. A lot of times, it’s insignificant things, documentation and such. Sometimes you catch something more significant, but the ones that you miss that your team members pick up, those are the things you don’t miss the next time around. Experience builds upon itself in this way, and perhaps it’s not a major moment, but a gradual process of learning the profession in a practical way.
That said, the biggest turning point in my time with CAMP was going from a staff clinical physicist to a member of the leadership team. I feel like there’s so much I’ve learned because I’m not a business major. I’m not a business person. I’m not super apt to talk to people on the phone. Those are things that I’ve had to do. I’ve often had to negotiate contracts and work with hospital administrators to show the value of our role as medical physicists. Explaining what a medical physicist does can be quite challenging.
Having the right team in place is a big part of it, being willing to bring those team members in. For a long time, I worked closely with Gyongyver, a great colleague and mentor who has since retired. Now I work more with Kiernan as far as clinical leadership and Kiernan deserves a lot of credit for leading our therapy team through growth and finding ways to standardize even as we’ve brought more clients and team members on board. And it’s been great to be able to pull Annie in to have some of that MBA expertise to know how to handle HR situations, to know what legal requirements there are in the state of Colorado for us to communicate to our employees, the things we would otherwise miss as physicists.
It comes with experience and good teamwork, learning how to build and maintain and communicate your value to the hospital administrations that you are serving, and ultimately to serve their patients better.
You mentioned building things. Can you talk more about that?
When you step back and think about how far we’ve come, there’s something to be proud of there. But it’s not something that I think any one of us can claim individually. CAMPsight was a part of Brad’s overall vision for CAMP but was primarily Jen’s project, and I was brought in late to provide feedback on it from a therapy perspective. But the fact that we had a very old Access database that was a mess and not reliable, and now we have a full-blown system to manage our hundreds of machines we QA and our calendar and other things, our time cards—it’s really something.
It’s humbling to know that you couldn’t do any of this on your own, but as a team I think we’ve built something really special, and it will continue to grow beyond my time here because the culture is in place and the focus is on the quality of care provided to the patients who are ultimately impacted by what we do day to day.
What advice would you give to someone just starting out in medical physics?
It’s important to determine your career goals and ensure that your training and mentorship focus on those specific objectives. If your aim is to engage in research, work at a university hospital, or work in academia, pursuing a PhD is a worthwhile endeavor. On the other hand, if you aspire to be a clinical physicist, an area where CAMP truly excels, and are interested in making a direct impact on patient care, you should tailor your training accordingly.
You need to find a way to get hands-on experience in the clinic and to build that resume so that you can get into that residency. Call your local practices, find out who’s in your area, reach out, and find a mentor (use the mentorship program on the AAPM that will match you to a mentor appropriate to what you want to do). When I first learned about medical physics as an undergraduate, Ralph Christensen encouraged me to apply for an AAPM summer fellowship, which I did. That summer gave me valuable time in the clinic at UK, and gave me a better understanding of medical physics before I started graduate school in addition to being a great resume-builder.
Our resident right now, Chase, is from Colorado Springs. He came and shadowed us. He toured with one of our diagnostic physicists, and with one of our therapy physicists. We advised him to look at CAMPEP programs for clinical medical physics and he ended up going to the University of Kentucky for his masters degree, returned to his home state, and now he’s our first resident. But he reached out. He found us. He asked questions. I would encourage those just starting out to explore the career options in medical physics and advocate for themselves in a similar fashion.
Kate Lofton officially marks her 15th anniversary with CAMP Physics on July 11, 2025. As co-owner and clinical leader, she continues to balance part-time clinical work with leadership responsibilities, peer review development, and raising three children with fellow CAMP physicist and CEO Brad Lofton. Her journey from that hasty Derby Week interview to leading a thriving practice illustrates both the personal growth possible in medical physics and the evolution of a field that continues to push the boundaries of precision cancer care.
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