Good evening ladies and gentlemen and thank you Saiful for your kind introduction. I am deeply honored to receive the Coolidge Award. To be recognized by my peers for something that has been my singular focus in life, of course, beyond my beloved family, is very special. It is truly humbling to receive the award in the presence tonight of so many accomplished leaders of our profession who are recipients of various awards today. Congratulations to all. This is indeed an incredible and memorable moment for all of us.

First, I would like to recognize my mentors who had a profound impact on my professional career; Drs. Sudarshan Loyalka and Marc Edwards, my PhD thesis supervisors at University of Missouri, Dr. Bob Shalek and Dr. Peter Almond who gave me the first post-doctoral opportunity at MD Anderson, Dr. Ken Hogstrom my first professional mentor at MD Anderson who instilled great work ethics and professional integrity in me. Dr. Suntha, Dr. Faiz Khan, Dr. Ravinder Nath, Dr. Bhudatt Paliwal, and Dr. James Purdy who have been an enduring inspiration to me throughout my professional career in Medical Physics. I have always felt privileged to be under their tutelage. These giants in the field, who themselves have been Coolidge Awardees greatly influenced who I am and what I have been able to accomplish in Medical Physics. I thank them from the bottom of my heart. I am also blessed to have an opportunity to work alongside the most wonderful and amazing physician and physics colleagues at MD Anderson, Thomas Jefferson, Saint Jude Children's Hospital, and University of Florida. Now I am having the best time of my life with colleagues at Virginia Commonwealth University and at VA hospitals nationwide. I owe each one of them my utmost gratitude for their guidance, support, and encouragement. Several of them are in the audience today. I love you guys.

I would like to take this opportunity to reflect upon my four decades of experience in medical physics. Earlier in my career, medical physics was all about developing and implementing newer technologies and techniques, ensuring safety and optimal performance of equipment, maintaining quality, making measurements, and complying with regulations.

Medical physicists can and should play a pivotal role in healthcare. The uniqueness of our profession is that we are trained to understand both the clinical and technical aspects of patient care, which cannot be said about anyone else in the healthcare arena. We must invoke scientific principles in analyzing challenging clinical situations, embrace data-driven decision support systems, assess the necessity and value of each clinical task in our domain, take leadership role in safety and risk-assessment, and practice active and effective communication. The role of a medical physicist must be revisited. Gone are the days when we could sit in our cubby holes or offices, if you happen to be one of the lucky ones, check charts, perform machine calibrations and QA after hours and on weekends.

Dear colleagues: before you know it, most of what we have been focusing our efforts on will be done by computers and software developed by one of you. We must respond to the changing role of a medical physicist as a chief technical consultant to clinical practitioners and healthcare executives. We should not simply be subservient to our physician colleagues and administrators. We must demonstrate our role as someone who is trained to facilitate safe, efficient and optimal patient care. Let us begin this journey now and take the message from Medical Physics 3.0 to heart.

On a personal note, I am forever indebted to my departed parents who instilled the highest human and social values in me and my siblings as we grew up in India and later settled in the US. I would like to thank my most precious family who is in the audience today for their unwavering support of my medical physics career and their ever present love; my wife Rita, two daughters Manisha and Priya and their husbands Jonathan and Nrupen. I would like to give a shot out to the love and joy of Rita and my life, our granddaughters Maya and Anya. Last but not the least, I would like to recognize my brother Satinder who not only has nose for good wines and scotches but is the real anchor of our family. I love you Bro.

Finally, I am proud to be one of you who have dedicated our careers to better human health through medical physics. God bless you and God Bless the profession of Medical Physics.