The Continuing Education Committee of the Health Physics Society (HPS) is still looking for continuing education lecturers (CELs) and professional enrichment program (PEP) speakers for the annual meeting in Spokane. If you are interested in giving a CEL (1 hour) or PEP (2 hour), kindly contact Rob Sitsler as soon as possible. Scott Walker will give two PEPs on accelerators, but other topics are solicited. Remember, the PEP honorarium may be waived in lieu of meeting registration. This might be a great way to get to go to the meeting by having part of your meeting expenses paid.
The midyear in New Orleans went off well. Now it is time to focus on the upcoming annual HPS meeting in Spokane. We are organizing a special accelerator session and hope also to obtain funding for a Morgan Lecturer. Thanks to all who submitted abstracts. This is the 50th meeting anniversary, so let's make this accelerator session top-notch. We have an exciting program planned and look forward to seeing our accelerator colleagues at the meeting. If you have specific items that you would like the board to consider, kindly send them along to any board or executive member of the Accelerator Section, in plenty of time to be included on the board agenda.
Once again, the Accelerator Section is supporting the H. Wade Patterson Award for the outstanding presentation given by a graduate student whose work is related to the field of accelerator health physics. This is a real honor and comes with a plaque and an honorarium. So, let's get the word out to our potential awardees.
Operational health physics at Louisiana State University's Center for Advanced Microstructures and Devices (CAMD) facility keeps us hopping. We have brought in a new wiggler tomography beamline and recommissioned our protein crystallography (PX) beamline after the addition of a channel-cut monochromator. A small-angle x-ray scattering (SAXS) beamline and a separate x-ray diffraction (XRD) beamline are in various stages of commissioning. It would be of interest to initiate a discussion regarding people's experiences with PLC interlock logic and the interlocking of machine and area monitors. Please let me know if you are interested.