First, congratulations to Scott Walker, Kamran Vaziri, Elsa Nimmo, and Linnea Wahl for an outstanding midyear meeting, as well as to Patricia Lee who really helped as chair of the Program Committee. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank the Northern California Chapter who also worked tirelessly to make the midyear meeting a success: John Ahlquist, who got the ball rolling along with our Accelerator Section member, Carter Ficklen; Kathleen Dinnel-Jones, Radoslav Radev, Dawn Banghart . . . thanks to each and every one for your support, help, time, and effort. We should all be proud of a job well done.
And thanks to the two academic deans, Don Cossairt and Vashek Vylet, and the incredibly gifted administrative dean, Linnea Wahl, for putting together such a wonderful school. It was so well attended and we heard just wonderful things. As a participant myself, everything was just first-class. I know each of you worked very hard and much overtime to achieve everything.
Life is hopping in the Bayou State. We continue to receive parts from the old IBM Helios machine, courtesy of our friends at Jefferson Lab. This will enable us to increase the energy of the Linac from 200 MeV to 300 MeV. Unfortunately that has also meant that we have to move the klystron gallery from the linac vault to the experimental hall floor to accommodate all this new equipment. The accelerator group is vigorously planning all the details of the move, purchasing new waveguides, and upgrading electrical and other utilities. Shortly we will receive our helium recompressor from Russia, which ought to help in the helium-consumption category. We also have a wiggler upgrade in the works from 7 to 7.5 T with three times the power output. There are two other proposals out for two more insertion devices, one for ultraviolet spectroscopy and another for an X-ray insertion device. All this work is keeping us very, very busy.
I hope to see at least some of you in Pittsburgh at the 2008 Health Physics Society annual meeting.