AAPM Recognizes Contributions to Medical Physics

The American Association of Physicists in Medicine presented its awards for 2001 at its annual meeting held in Salt Lake City, Utah, in July.

Ravinder Nath, a professor and chief of the department of therapeutic radiology at the Yale University School of Medicine, received the William D. Coolidge Award. This award is the society’s highest honor, given in recognition of a distinguished career in medical physics. The citation praised Nath for his significant contributions to advances in radiation medicine, to AAPM and other organizations that deal with medical applications of physics, and to the medical physics literature.

The Farrington Daniels Award, given for the best paper on radiation dosimetry published in Medical Physics during the previous year, went to Iwan Kawrakow for his paper entitled “Accurate Condensed History Monte Carlo Simulation of Electron Transport I: EGSnrc, The New EGS4 Version.” Kawrakow is a research officer in the ionizing radiation standards department at the National Research Council’s Institute for National Measurement Standards in Ottawa, Ontario.

Two Sylvia Sorkin Greenfield Awards, given for the best paper (other than radiation dosimetry) published in Medical Physics during the previous year, were presented at the meeting. The first was shared by Marc Kachelriess, Stefan Schaller, and Willi Kalender for their paper entitled “Advanced Single-Slice Rebinning in Cone-Beam Spiral CT.” Schaller is head of applications pre-development in the computer tomography division at Siemens in Forchheim, Germany. Kalender is director of, and a professor of medical physics at, the Institute of Medical Physics at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany. Kachelriess is a physicist at the same institute.

The second Greenfield Award went to David Jaffray and Jeffrey Siewerdsen for their paper entitled “Cone-Beam Computed Tomography with a Flat-Panel Imager: Initial Performance Characterization.” Jaffray is a staff physicist and Siewerdsen is a senior research scientist in the radiation oncology department at William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Michigan.