Our annual technical session will be at 10:15 AM on Tuesday, July 15, at the Health Physics Society (HPS) annual meeting in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The business meeting of our section will be at the end of the technical session. Please plan to stay around for the business meeting that starts at 12:00 noon as your board of directors values your input.
This year’s election committee consisted of Don Gregory from Oak Ridge National Lab and Michael Duran from Los Alamos National Lab, and the committee was chaired by Past-President Scott Walker. We had good member participation. We received more that twice the number of last year’s votes. The results will be certified and finalized at the Accelerator Section’s business meeting.
Our section membership has had a net increase of 10% since 2006. Please continue to encourage your accelerator health physics colleagues to join the section.
Our valiant newsletter editor, Linnea Wahl, has been made a fellow of the HPS. Congratulations to Linnea for this well-deserved recognition.
The process of selecting HPS delegates for the 12th International Congress of the International Radiation Protection Association (IRPA 12) is underway. IRPA 12 will be held October 19-24, 2008, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The HPS is eligible to send 29 delegates to the general assembly meeting held in conjunction with the congress. Ten individuals have been selected from the HPS Board of Directors and the remaining 19 will be selected from the general membership. This year the rule for selection of delegates was changed to permit each HPS chapter and section to nominate one member as a candidate for selection without requiring the nominee to obtain sponsors. Two of our members asked to be considered and their names were submitted to the section’s board of directors. Scott Walker was elected to be the Accelerator Section's IRPA 12 delegate.
Several students are presenting their work in accelerator health physics at the annual HPS meeting. Dr. Sam Baker from Argonne National Lab has graciously agreed to act as the judge for selecting one of the students’ presentations for the Wade Patterson Award. The winner will be selected on Monday and will receive the award consisting of a plaque and $250 cash prize at the section’s business meeting. The name of the Wade Patterson Award winner will be announced at the Tuesday night banquet and will be published in the journal Health Physics. Please continue encouraging your students, student colleagues, or your colleagues to consider accelerator health physics as a career opportunity.
We have received the sad news that our 2007 Morgan Lecturer Anthony A. Sullivan passed away in May. Please see the obituary in this newsletter.
Finally, this is my last message as the president. With the first Accelerator-Section-sponsored midyear in ten years and the 2008 professional development school such huge successes, this was definitely a very exciting year to serve the section. I would like to thank our members for their support and active participation. I would like to specially thank Henry Kahnhauser the president-elect, Scott Walker our past president, Marcia Torres our treasurer (who also informally filled the section's secretary position for two years), and Linnea Wahl our tireless newsletter editor, who improved the section's webpage immensely and did such an admirable job as the administrative dean of the 2008 professional development school. I would also like to thank the Accelerator Section Board of Directors for valuable discussions and input. I am looking forward to seeing you in Pittsburgh.