Special Announcement from the Dean:
Dear Colleagues,
As many of you have heard, Dr. Mark Law, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, has accepted a position as Director of the UF Honors Program, effective Aug. 16, 2014. This is a wonderful opportunity for Mark and for the UF Honors program. Mark has been involved in Honors both as a student, and as an alumni member of the Honors Advisory Board at his alma mater. I am very grateful to Mark for his service to our college. He led the college team through two successful accreditation visits, SACS and ABET, and his efforts were particularly important in advancing diversity and inclusion and in improving graduate student recruiting. Please join me in wishing Mark great success in his new position.
We will begin a search at the start of the fall semester for Mark’s replacement. The search committee will be chaired by Dr. Jennifer Curtis, Associate Dean for Research and Facilities, and will include a representative from each department. The search will be internal with the expectation that a permanent Associate Dean will be on board by January 1, 2015.
Until the search is completed, Dr. Wes Bolch has graciously agreed to serve as Interim Associate Dean. Wes is Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Medical Physics in the J. Crayton Pruitt Family Department of Biomedical Engineering. He has served as chair of the College Tenure and Promotion Committee for the past several years and thus is very experienced in the T&P process. In addition to his work on the College T&P Committee, Wes serves as Director of ALRADS – the Advanced Laboratory for Radiation Dosimetry Studies at UF. Dr. Bolch earned his BSE degree in environmental engineering in 1984, his ME and PhD degrees in radiological physics in 1986 and 1998, respectively, from the University of Florida. He has been certified by the American Board of Health Physics since 1994 and licensed in Radiological Health Engineering by the Texas Board of Professional Engineers since 1992. In 2011, Dr. Bolch was elected Fellow of both the Health Physics Society (HPS) and the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM). He has been a member of the Society of Nuclear Medicine’s Medical Internal Radiation Dose (MIRD) Committee since 1993, a member of the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements (NCRP) since 2005, and a member of Committee 2 of the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) since 2005. He has published over 160 peer-reviewed journal articles, co-authored/edited 14 books/book chapters, and served as author on two NCRP Reports, two ICRP Publications, and two MIRD Monographs. Dr. Bolch has managed a broad research program including (1) NIH and DOE funded projects to construct high-resolution models of the skeleton to support dose-response studies in radionuclide therapy and radiation epidemiology, (2) NIH funded projects to develop scalable NURBS-based and voxel-based computational phantoms of adult and pediatric patients and associated software for organ dose assessment in nuclear medicine, computed tomography, interventional fluoroscopy, and radiotherapy, (3) private company funded projects to develop stereotactic kilovoltage x-ray treatments for age-related macular degeneration and glaucoma, and (4) CDC funded projects in stochastic modeling of worker inhalation and gamma-ray exposures following radiological accidents and potential terrorist events. He is the recipient of the 2014 Distinguish Scientific Achievement Award by the Health Physics Society acknowledging outstanding contributions to the science and technology of radiation safety.
Please join me in welcoming Wes to this new position.
Best regards,
Cammy Abernathy
Dean, College of Engineering