Last summer, when the Health Physics Society (HPS) authorized the Accelerator Section to work with the Northern California Chapter in putting together the 2008 midyear meeting on "Radiation-Generating Devices," a flurry of activity between the Accelerator Section and the Northern California Chapter began. The Northern California Chapter is meeting regularly to coordinate local arrangements and has put together a web page to disseminate information and advertise the meeting. In addition, they have also met with local convention bureau to develop T-shirts, pins, and other means of advertising the meeting at the Knoxville midyear meeting and the annual meeting in Portland, Oregon. Individuals from the California chapter will attend the Knoxville meeting to staff a booth in the vendor area.
Please note the article about the 2008 Professional Development School (PDS). The PDS is also making significant progress and is being steered academically by the capable hands of Don Cossairt and Vashek Vylet. Linnea Wahl is doing all the footwork for the budget and administration of the school. (I have no idea how she makes time for the newsletter, the school, and acting as liason between the chapter and the section.)
Lorraine Day, Kamrin Vaziri, and I have exchanged many emails among ourselves with Linnea Wahl to try and expedite the various technical functions necessary to prepare for this meeting. We started the meeting preparation quite late compared to other midyear meetings and have been working to catch up with the needed preplanning. Enhancing the attendance at this meeting is quite important since our last radiation-generating devices meeting was the smallest midyear to date. In an effort to increase the attendance, we have greatly broadened the scope of the meeting. The call for abstracts solicits papers from the following subject areas:
It is hoped that the inclusion of the medical community and homeland security will greatly broaden the base of potential attendees for the meeting. In addition, the number of abstract topics under each general topic has been greatly expanded. Abstracts are due July 31, 2007.
Budgets for travel continue to shrink and organizations need to preplan how they will spend their professional travel budget. Thus, the Accelerator Section has enlisted the help of a graphic designer to develop a high-quality poster as a means of advertising the meeting a full year ahead of time. The poster is 24 inches x 20 inches and will be printed on an offset press. We plan to distribute the poster through both e-mail and the postal service. One thousand posters have been ordered. My initial plan was to print 500 of the posters, but as I looked at the need for distribution, I have changed the order to 1000.
Half of the posters will be pre-folded for mailing in manila envelopes and the other half will be distributed at both the midyear and the annual meetings. I encourage each of you to take a look at the poster and distribute it to your colleagues. I would like to acknowledge the skill of a Los Alamos National Laboratory graphics designer named Shirley Veenis. I am sure you will agree that the quality of the poster she designed is superb. (For the record, the picture she used on the poster is copyrighted, and we did purchase it.) Please contact the HPS Secretariat to request full-size posters to hang on your own bulletin boards. I would especially solicit your help in distributing the posters! We need mailing addresses for accelerators across the world, large hospitals and medical facilities, homeland security offices, ports, emergency response organizations in large cities, sterilizers, and industrial accelerator facilities!
The poster is nearly complete and as such was sent to the HPS president, Brian Dodd. Brian sent the poster to the HPS Board of Directors and gave them the opportunity to review the poster, submit comments, and vote to accept or reject it by e-mail. In the end, the board voted unanimously to accept the poster with a few minor changes. We have been careful to keep the appropriate committee chairs informed of what we are doing and that communication paid off. As a result, Brian Dodd has given us permission to proceed with the printing. Each of us owe Brain a special note thanks. Brian has also asked the HPS Secretariat if they would be willing to mail the posters and he received an affirmative. He has been a great advocate for our session since the very first proposal.
Please heed Kamran’s call for abstracts for the 2007 annual meeting in Portland. Research dollars are short but operational health physics papers are just as important. I would also suggest that papers presented at the summer session might also be repeated at the 2008 midyear since the midyear session is normally a different audience. However, if you have different material for the 2008 midyear, please prepare that in lieu of presenting a paper you have already presented. Kamran has sent a list of proposed Morgan Lecturers to the board of the HPS. He is to be congratulated for his timely effort. Last year, I was too late in my submission to even gain consideration for a Morgan Lecturer. The session for the summer meeting is progressing. We would especially like to see student papers. We have attempted to give the Patterson Award to a student for the past two years with no success. Students, please submit accelerator type posters and or papers!! Professors, please encourage your students to submit!!
Thank you all for your support and have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.