Welcome and Thank You

January 2024 is the start of my two-year term as Chair of NMISC. I sincerely thank our outgoing Chair, Andrew Goertzen, and Past Chair, Roger Fulton, both mentoring and training me for this position in the past two years, and for their efforts to lead the committee activities, engaging our technical committee members. I look forward to continuing to work with Andrew in his role as Past Chair, especially on several improvement projects we started together to make sustainable impact on our society. I also look forward to working with Mitra Safavi-Naeini who will start her two-year term as Vice Chair, and continuing to work with Nicolas Karakatsanis, Secretary, who will serve his last year as Secretary, but with immense experience in helping to run our technical committee’s activities.

I want to thank the committee members whose terms ended in 2023: Dimitra Darambara, Andrea Gonzalez Montoro, Emilie Roncali, Volkmar Schultz, Hamid Sabet for their service that included mostly remote activities during the latest pandemic era. I also welcome the new elected members whose three-year terms begin in 2024: Gerard Ariño Estrada, Christoph Lerche, Greta Mok, Magdalena Rafecas, and Kuangyu Shi.

Notes from NMISC General Meeting in Vancouver

I was very pleased to attend the second in-person/hybrid NSS/MIC/RTSD which was held in 2023 in the beautiful waterfront venue, Vancouver Convention Centre, with MIC Co-Chairs, Margaret Daube-Witherspoon and Rutao Yao organizing a very vibrant MIC program. We look forward to continuing this hybrid meeting tradition for the 2024 meeting which is scheduled to be held in Tampa, Florida, with Georges El Fakhri as MIC Chair and Kira Grogg as MIC Deputy Chair leading the MIC program from our technical community.

The NMISC annual general meeting was held during the 2023 NSS/MIC/RTSD in Vancouver, with a few committee members attending the meeting remotely, reflecting the truly hybrid nature of our conferences nowadays. In addition to the reports by the Chair and the Secretary, we had several subcommittee reports for Awards-Fellow, Conference Record, and Trainee Awards by the designated chairs. The Conference Record subcommittee was a joint committee between NMISC and RISC, which led the timely publication of the full conference record, making immediate impact on how our conferences are run. During the general meeting we elected the incoming Vice Chair, and agreed to form another joint subcommittee with RISC to review and make recommendations on the conference schedule. The committee also voted to approve our endorsement of the Emission Tomography & Standardization Initiative (ETSI), co-led by Nicolas Karakatsanis, NMISC, and requested the technical sponsorship of NPSS for PSMR 2024.

Finally, we are in the process of electing a new Joint Oversight Subcommittee (JOS) Vice Chair and Member at Large. I look forward to working with JOS in fulfilling our responsibilities of identifying the best possible conference sites, meeting our needs, and providing the potential to improve and grow. 

More information on NMISC activities is available at https://ieee-npss.org/technical-committees/nuclear-medical-and-imaging-sciences/

Youngho Seo, NMISC Chair, can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].