Ottawa) - Carleton Physics Professor David W.O. Rogers has been awarded the 2010 William D. Coolidge Award from the 7,000-member American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM). He is the fourth Canadian recipient.
This is the AAPM’s highest honour and is presented annually to a member who has made a significant impact on the scientific practice of medical physics, had a significant influence on the professional development of the careers of other medical physicists, and demonstrated leadership in national and/or international organizations, with specific emphasis on AAPM activities.
“Dave Rogers is one of the greatest medical physicists that Canada has produced to date and he richly deserves the Coolidge Award,” says Ervin B. Podgorsak, professor emeritus from McGill University, who nominated Rogers for the award.
Dr. Rogers is the Canada Research Chair in Medical Physics and heads the Carleton Laboratory for Radiotherapy Physics. He uses computer simulations to help improve the treatment of cancer using radiation. The computer simulations allow accurate calculations of how radiation deposits energy in either the patient or in instruments designed to measure radiation. In the former case, these calculations allow better treatments to be developed because the doctors have a more accurate knowledge of where the radiation is being deposited. In the later case, his research has led to an improved understanding of how to measure radiation in the cancer clinic. Dr Rogers was the principal proponent of the clinical protocol used in cancer clinics throughout North America to establish the dose delivered to over 600,000 radiotherapy patients a year.
Dr. Rogers earned his PhD in experimental nuclear physics from the University of Toronto in 1972. Following a postdoc at Oxford, he joined what is now the National Research Council’s (NRC) Ionizing Radiation Standards Group that provides Canada’s national calibration service for instruments that measure ionizing radiation. He became group leader in 1984 and held that position until 2003, when he moved to Carleton.
He has been active in teaching and mentoring graduate students and post-doctoral fellows both at Carleton and previously when he was Carleton adjunct research professor while working at NRC. His former trainees are now in leadership roles throughout the North American medical physics community and in various ionizing radiation standards labs in Europe.
Dr. Rogers is extremely active on several committees of the AAPM concerning radiation dosimetry for cancer therapy. He has served on international committees of the International Commission on Radiation Units & Measurements (ICRU) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as well as being Canada’s representative on the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (BIPM) committee for ionizing radiation standards. In addition, he has been active in the Canadian Organization of Medical Physicists (COMP) where he served as chair (1983-84).
An award-winning author, he is one of two deputy editors of the international journal Medical Physics. He has co-authored numerous user manuals for the Monte Carlo code systems that he helped develop for simulating the transport of electrons and photons in materials. These have become the gold standards in the field.
Most recently, as program director of the medical physics program at Carleton, which is the core of the Ottawa Medical Physics Institute of 30 medical physicists, he led Carleton’s effort to win international accreditation of its PhD program in this area.
Physics at Carleton
In addition to its leading-edge research in medical physics. the Department of Physics at Carleton is renowned for its research in particle physics. As a full partner in TRIUMF, Canada’s National Laboratory for Particle and Nuclear Physics, Carleton benefits greatly from this partnership and contributes to the TRIUMF research program. Carleton has also played key roles in developing the SNOLAB laboratory for underground science and the ATLAS experiment at CERN, one of the largest, international partnerships in the physical sciences. Both of these global collaborations are looking at solving key problems related to the nature of matter in the universe. Carleton is home to Canada’s premier theoretical physics group that concentrates on collider physics.
For more information:
Dr. David Rogers
drogers [at] physics [dot] carleton [dot] ca
613-520-2600, ext. 4374
Lin Moody
Media Relations
Carleton University
613-520-2600, ext. 8705