Members of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine have selected a new president-elect: Howard Amols, chief of clinical physics at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City since 1998 and a professor of physics in radiology at Cornell University. Amols will become president-elect on 1 January 2004, begin his term as president in 2005, and will chair the AAPM board in 2006. He succeeds G. Donald Frey, who will take the presidency in January (see Physics Today, October 2002, page 67).
“Medical physics, diagnostic radiology, and radiation oncology have all undergone tremendous changes over the last 10 years, driven mostly by technological advances,” said Amols. “Most significantly, computer-controlled linear accelerators in radiation therapy and computer-intensive imaging modalities in radiology, such as CT [computed tomography], PET [positron emission tomography], and MRI [magnetic resonance imaging] have radically changed the practice of medicine and medical physics,” he said. “As a result, the AAPM must address new questions about medical physics training programs, continuing education, and professional practice and credentialing. Our interactions with medical societies and our medical colleagues have also changed as a result of increasingly complex technology.”
Amols added that “the AAPM itself has grown in terms of membership, budget, and staffing—all of this in the backdrop of a nationwide shortage of medical physicists and decreasing reimbursement rates from both Medicare and HMOs [health maintenance organizations] for medical physics services. In short, the AAPM, now 46 years old, has reached middle age! As president-elect, I hope to get our membership more involved in meeting these new challenges.”
Amols received a BS in physics in 1970 from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City. He earned his MS in 1973 and his PhD in 1974, both in physics, from Brown University. From 1974 to 1976, Amols was a National Cancer Institute postdoctoral fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico before becoming a member of the research staff there. He held that position for three years.
Amols joined the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, in 1979 as an assistant professor in the radiology department. He became chief physicist in the radiation therapy department at Rhode Island Hospital in Providence in 1981 and concurrently was an associate professor of radiation medicine at nearby Brown University. In 1986, he took the post of chief physicist in the radiation oncology department of what is now New York-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City and began teaching at Columbia University, where he later (1991) was appointed a full professor.
In other AAPM election results, Maryellen Giger (University of Chicago) was elected treasurer, effective 1 January. Also taking office in January for three-year terms are the new board members: David Pickens (Vanderbilt University), Beth Schueler (Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota), and J. Anthony Seibert (University of California, Davis).
