Medical Physicists Honored by AAPM

At a ceremony held during the annual meeting of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in July, the following individuals were recognized for their achievements in medical physics.

C. Clifton Ling was acknowledged for his distinguished career in medical physics with the presentation of the association’s highest honor, the William D. Coolidge Award. Ling is the Enid A. Haupt Professor and chairman of the department of medical physics at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and professor of radiology in the Weill Medical College of Cornell University, both in New York City.

Outstanding career accomplishments earned Donald E. Herbert the Award for Achievement in Medical Physics. He is a professor of radiology and director of the Biostatistics and Epidemiology Core Unit at the University of South Alabama College of Medicine in Mobile.

A Special Award for Outstanding Contributions to Medical Physics was granted posthumously to radiologist and medical physicist Carl J. Vyborny, who contributed to the understanding of the physical aspects of image quality and to the clinical use of computer-aided diagnosis.

The John R. Cameron Young Investigator Award was presented to Amit Sawant for his paper entitled “Empirical Investigation of a New Generation of High QE Detectors for Active Matrix Flat-Panel Imager EPIDs.” He is a graduate student in biomedical engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Alex Trofimov, an instructor in the radiation oncology department at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, was the inaugural recipient of the Jack Fowler Junior Investigator Award, given to the top-scoring junior investigator abstract submission.

The Farrington Daniels Award, given for the best paper on dosimetry that appeared in Medical Physics the previous year, went to Brad Warkentin, Stephen Steciw, Satyapal Rathee, and B. Gino Fallone. They were honored for their article entitled “Dosimetric IMRT Verification with a Flat-Panel EPID.”

The Sylvia Sorkin Greenfield Award, for the best nondosimetry paper to appear in Medical Physics the previous year, was given to Tao Wu, Alexander Stewart, Martin Stanton, Thomas McCauley, Walter Phillips, Daniel Kopans, Richard Moore, Jeffrey Eberhard, Beale Opshal-Ong, Loren Niklason, and Mark Williams. Their winning article was entitled “Tomographic Mammography Using a Limited Number of Low-Dose Cone-Beam Projection Images.”