The title of the 2008 midyear meeting has been chosen as “Radiation-Generating Devices.” Planning for the 2008 midyear meeting and professional development school has progressed significantly since the last Health Physics Society (HPS) summer meeting. Vaclav Vylet and Don Cossairt have been appointed academic deans of the professional development school, and Linnea Wahl has been appointed administrative dean. The midyear meeting and school will be held at the Oakland Marriot in Oakland, California. The midyear meeting will be held from January 27 to 30; the school will be held from January 31 to February 2, following directly after the midyear meeting.
Nisy Ipe, Elsa Nimmo, and I were appointed to the 2008 midyear Technical Review Task Force of the HPS Program Committee (unfortunately, Nisy recently had to resign because of time constraints). As such, we will review each submitted abstract for applicability and technical content. We have put together a tentative list of topics for the midyear. Currently this is only a topic list and will be sorted into sessions after the abstracts arrive. If you feel a topic has been left out, please contact me with suggestions. The radiation-generating device topics include the following:
The applicable facilities include the following:
I am in the process of putting together a poster to advertise the meeting one year before the date of the meeting (so it is important to finalize the list of topics as soon as possible). We plan to print several hundred of these posters and distribute them to accelerators, hospitals, homeland security facilities, industrial accelerator facilities, etc., across the U.S. and the world and at the 2007 Knoxville midyear meeting. We have attempted to broaden the topics as much as possible within the constraints of the theme. The last midyear on the topic of radiation-generating machines had a small attendance compared to most midyears so it is very important to ensure a good attendance if we ever plan to hold this meeting again.
The 2008 Professional Development School (it used to be called the summer school) has changed venue and format for our meeting. The time of the school has become more flexible and since the midyear is titled “Radiation-Generating Devices,” the topic of the school is also centered on this topic. It is intended to make the classes in the school more in-depth and detailed in the coming years with less focus on general overview (as you will see from the deans’ contribution to this newsletter). The school will be held in the same hotel as the meeting.
The Northern California Chapter of the HPS (NCCHPS) will be taking care of the local arrangements. They plan to discuss the meeting pin design, t-shirt design, and staffing of a booth for the Knoxville midyear at their next chapter meeting. In addition to being the school administrative dean, Linnea Wahl has volunteered to act as the chapter/section liaison to coordinate our efforts to preplan the meeting.
We have had no applicable papers from students in the past two years so we have not been able to present the H. Wade Patterson plaque for student papers in accelerator health physics. It is requested that everyone who has any contact with students encourage them to write accelerator health physics papers and submit them to the summer HPS meeting. If you need any more information, please contact me, Kamran Vaziri, or Lorraine Day.