The visit of Drs. Soffia and Zelada from Chile for a week long workshop on CT dose optimization coincided with the visit by Dr. John Boice, NCRP president, leading to synergistic exchanges for enhanced radiation safety in Latin America. On November 17, John Boice met with the medical physics students for a Q&A session. There he discussed his graduate education and his path to epidemiology from a background in nuclear engineering and medical physics. After obtaining his Doctorate of Science from Harvard, he began a career in radiation epidemiology. His prominence in the field led him to travel to Fukushima, Japan in 2011 following a nuclear disaster to analyze radiation-related illnesses. His recent projects involve a collaboration with NASA where preliminary studies of mice indicate that high LET radiation exposure in the brain can cause dementia. Scientists at NASA are interested in studying this correlation in relation to their mission to sending humans to Mars.
