The President's Message

The San Diego meeting was well represented by members of the Accelerator Section and was very successful for our section in many ways:

• We had a very successful technical session with a number of excellent papers.
• One of our members, Ralph Thomas, was selected as a G. William Morgan Lecturer for the Health Physics Society (HPS) and provided the keynote address at our technical session. See the photo below.
• One of our members, Ken Kase, has become the president of the HPS. Congratulations to Ken and best wishes for his tenure as president.
• The first H. Wade Patterson Memorial Award was presented to John Shanahan for the best student paper presented at the Accelerator Session. John is a graduate student in the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, health physics master's degree program, and his paper was titled, "Calculations of Dose Coefficients for Radionuclides Produced in Spallation Neutron Sources."
• On-going interest has been expressed in a midyear meeting on radiation-generating machines to be sponsored by the Accelerator Section and the Northern California Chapter of the HPS for a meeting in 2007.

It was clear from my discussions with the officers of the HPS that the strength and contributions of the Accelerator Section to the society are well recognized.

One of the important parts of our annual business meeting is to announce our new officers and board members. As always, we had excellent candidates and I am pleased to announce that the following persons were elected:

• Sayed Rokni, President-elect
• Marcia Torres, Treasurer
• Linnea Wahl, Newsletter Editor
• Stephen Butala, Director
• Kamran Vaziri, Director

It is also a time to thank other members for their efforts while on the board: Wes Dunn who served as a board member, Scott Schwahn who served as past president, and Lorraine Day who served a double-duty role last year as secretary and treasurer. Special thanks are due to Carter Ficklen for his work as president this year and to Linnea Wahl who makes this newsletter happen every quarter.

It is clear that the strength of our section comes from the hard work of so many people. My interactions with the members of the section and the board during the meeting have energized me for the year ahead. I look forward to working with many of you on issues of importance to our section. Please let me know your thoughts on topics and issues that we should be thinking about during the year ahead.

Carter Ficklen, Past President of the Accelerator Section, Congratulates Ralph Thomas, 2003 G. William Morgan Lecturer