Rafe McBeth

Director of Artificial Intelligence, University of Pennsylvania Department of Radiation Oncology

Rafe McBeth, PhD, DABR, is an Innovation Faculty member at the Penn Center for Cancer Care Innovation (PC3I), the Director of Artificial Intelligence for the Department of Radiation Oncology at the University of Pennsylvania, and an Assistant Professor of Clinical Radiation Oncology at the Perelman School of Medicine. He leads the design, validation, and clinical deployment of modern AI systems, including large language models and AI agents, across Penn Medicine’s radiation oncology network, translating frontier AI from research prototype to routine, trusted clinical practice.

Dr. McBeth’s central contribution is demonstrating that clinical AI works in practice, at scale. Under his direction, Penn has deployed AI-assisted contouring across 15 treatment sites, supporting more than 30,000 patients over three years with sustained physician adoption above 95 percent and an estimated 15,000 clinical hours returned to patient care. His team has also built AI-orchestrated systems in which autonomous agents chain the steps of the radiotherapy workflow, compressing the path from simulation to a deliverable plan from roughly nine days to about two hours, while preserving the full clinical safety chain.

His research sits at the intersection of frontier AI and clinical oncology, including agentic AI systems that orchestrate multi-step clinical workflows, large language models for clinical text and decision support, automated treatment planning, and machine-learning quality assurance, together with the engineering and governance practices that let these tools be commissioned, monitored, and trusted like any other clinical technology. He directs the McBeth Lab, created and teaches the graduate course “AI for Medicine” (MPHY 6120) for cross-program learners, and is a founding member of the ASTRO Artificial Intelligence Task Force.

Dr. McBeth earned his PhD in Radiation Physics from Colorado State University in 2017 and completed his medical physics residency at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. Before joining Penn in 2021, he was a medical health physicist and alternate radiation safety officer at the University of Colorado Hospital.