James T. Dobbins III, PH.D., served as president-elect of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM), for a year in 2020 before becoming president in 2021. AAPM is the leading organization of medical physics in the nation and the largest national organization of medical physics worldwide. Dr. Dobbins holds a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and joined the faculty of the School of Medicine at Duke in 1985. He became the founding director of the Duke Medical Physics Graduate Program in 2005 and directed that program for a decade, during which time it rose to become one of the top programs in the country. He became Associate Vice Provost in 2015, overseeing the academic and programmatic aspects of Duke Kunshan programs for Duke.
His area of expertise is advanced diagnostic imaging. He has twice won awards for best paper of the year in a scientific journal for work in the science of medical imaging. His areas of research focus have been quantitative measures of image quality and new techniques relevant to cancer imaging. An internationally recognized scholar in digital imaging, he has developed two techniques that are now in use clinically in hundreds of hospitals worldwide. He has also developed a novel approach for producing lower-cost CT for low- and middle-income countries.
He was elected Fellow of the AAPM in 2009 and served as chair of its Education Council since 2016, helping to shape national standards for graduate and residency education. He was also co-founder and president of the Society of Directors of Academic Medical Physics Programs, a professional society dedicated to improving the coordination of educational programs in medical physics.
Thank you, James, for the contributions you make here at Duke Radiology and around the world.