Improving Health Through Medical Physics

USA SCIENCE & ENGINEERING FESTIVAL

Yusuf E. Erdi, DSc, AAPM-PEC Vice Chair | New York, NY

AAPM Newsletter — Volume 43 No. 3 — May | June 2018

Upper left: Hung Ching, Tom Hu | Lower Left: Tom Hu, Kids | Center: Yusuf Erdi, Jialu Yu | Upper Right: Tom Hu, Jim Deye | Lower Right: Jim Deye, Hung Ching

The biennial USA Science & Engineering Festival (USASEF) is an open-to-public and free science festival that has been held in Washington, D.C. since 2010. The festival is the celebration of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines in the United States.

The 5th USA Science & Engineering Festival was a two–day Expo on April 7-8, 2018 at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. with an additional sneak-peek Friday.

Attendance of 360,000 was estimated for this 3-day event this year with more than 3,000 hands-on activities and over 1000 participating organizations.

AAPM is invited to participate in the USASEF by organizing members of AIP as a part of AIP booth (#5437). This year's AIP theme was "Everyday Physics" so each society, under AIP, selected a topic that uses physics in our daily lives. As AAPM PEC, we adopted "The image of everyday medicine" as a slogan for AAPM section (pictures) of the AIP booth.

We set-up a doctor's office with a portable ultrasound scanner which was graciously donated by Philips Medical Systems. During the 3-day event, we demonstrated the operation of a US scanner to hundreds of kids and adults through our booth volunteers. People that visited our booth, especially mothers, were really impressed with the size and quality of US technology since they can relate to US scans of their child from previous years. We received so many "Ooooo's and Ahaaa's" when we did a scan of their hands to show their finger bones. In addition, we did demo scans of a US phantom (Gammex) to show what an actual medical physicist can do in medical offices and hospitals.

Overall, USASEF was a successful event for AAPM and hopefully we have convinced a couple of bright minds to choose medical physics as their future profession.


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