From the President

Linnea Wahl (lewahl@lbl.gov)

Have you ever asked yourself, what is an accelerator health physicist? Maybe not, but probably your relatives or neighbors have! Did you have a good, comprehensive answer for them?

Now there is help and it’s as close as the Accelerator Section website. But first, a little background . . .

The Health Physics Society’s Science Support Committee is developing tools for high school teachers to make them aware of career opportunities in health physics. These tools include a poster that teachers can hang in their classrooms, a PowerPoint presentation that they can show to their students as part of the career awareness curriculum, and booth banners for science teacher meetings to promote the society and what we have to offer to science teachers.

To promote accelerator health physics, the Science Support Committee asked us to define our roles and to provide photos of accelerator health physicists on the job. In response, the section’s president-elect, Mike Grissom, drafted a definition and backed it up with a white paper. The section board tweaked the draft a bit and here’s what we sent to the Science Support Committee, along with photos of some of Mike’s colleagues at SLAC:

“An accelerator health physicist is a radiation safety professional who focuses on the radiation physics and/or worker protection (operational health physics) aspects of particle accelerator operations. At large facilities, such as the high-energy accelerators at many national laboratories, radiation physicists may design shielding, prepare accelerator operation safety envelopes, monitor configuration control and perform radiation safety system checks, conduct original research, and develop or use radiation transport computer codes. At all particle accelerator facilities, large and small, operational health physicists are on staff to support accelerator operations and ensure worker and public safety by keeping radiation exposures as low as reasonably achievable (ALARA), performing radiation surveys, accounting for radioactive material, providing personnel dosimetry, maintaining radiation detection instrumentation, monitoring and minimizing environmental impacts, and conducting radiation protection training. At small facilities, a single accelerator health physicist may be responsible for all these functions, filling the roles of both radiation physicist and operational health physicist.”

Pretty impressive career choice, right? Well, you don’t have to memorize it because not only will it become part of the Science Support Committee’s campaign to promote radiation protection careers, but it’s also posted on the front page of the Accelerator Section website at http://hpschapters.org/sections/accelerator/index.php3. Next time your mother-in-law asks you what you do all day, here’s the answer!