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Dear AFOMP colleagues,
A new AFOMP term has commenced, and I am honoured to have taken over from Professor Arun Chougule as President of AFOMP. We have assembled an excellent Executive Committee (please visit our AFOMP website) and the committee chairs are currently in the process of finalizing the membership of their respective committees, where we are aiming for geographical and gender diversity of appointments.
During this change of guards, I would like to wholeheartedly thank the outgoing ExCom members, namely Prof Kwan Ng, Prof Tomas Kron, Prof Chai-Hong Yeong and Dr Hajime Monzen for their service in the last election period 2018-2022. Some of them will continue to serve in advisory roles to the current chairs, which is greatly appreciated. A special thank you belongs to the past President, Prof Chougule, who worked tirelessly to improve the AFOMP international status, service to our members, including more educational programs and successfully secured funding for new AFOMP awards to recognize high achieving medical physicists and students in our region.
The current ExCom aims to continue the excellent work of the previous years and we will keep delivering educational offerings to members, including webinars and AFOMP schools. The Education and Training (ETC) chair, Prof Jin Xiance, and Science Committee (SC) chair, Prof Shigekazu Fukuda, are currently organizing the programme.
Our newsletter will continue to be issued twice a year and I am grateful to the editor, Dr Subramani, for continuing his role. It is, however, a big commitment and as such, we have just established an editorial team that will assist him with material preparation and newsletter production. We are also working on changing the format of the newsletter to make it more accessible. The content can always be greatly influenced by you – just send us your newsletter contributions.
I am also pleased that Dr Rajni Verma will continue to provide services related to IOMP website. Again, your input on the website improvements is very welcome.
There are many objectives of the ExCom for this election period, including developing more formal documentation of our processes (e.g. webinars organization, newsletter preparation, evaluations of applications for AFOMP endorsement,medical physics education syllabus finalization, etc.), establishing archives for all documents, so that the history of AFOMP is better documented and future hand-overs to new committees are seamless. We also wish to record interviews with our prominent members to create a historical record of our members’ work and achievements.
The IOMP’s 25th International Conference on Medical Physics (ICMP) – to be held in Mumbai, India during 6 to 9 Dec 2023 (https://www.icmp2023.org). This is the major IOMP conference, outside the IUPESM World Congresses, and is organized every 3 years. We are very honoured that ICMP 2023 is being held in the AFOMP region and it will also incorporate our annual AOCMP meeting. Many of our members will serve on the conference committees, for example, Prof Fukuda will be the Scientific Programme Committee Chair, and I will serve as the chair of the International Advisory Committee. We hope to see as many of you as possible in India for a face-to-face conference – hopefully in a fully post-pandemic world with international travel enabled.
I am very much looking forward to be working with the new Executive Committee and all National Member Organizations to further advance the medical physics profession in the AFOMP region.
With best wishes
Prof Eva Bezak, FACPESM, FIUPESM