2024 marks the 75^th anniversary of our Society. This important milestone was celebrated at our largest conference, the NSS/MIC/RTSD, which was held in Tampa, Fl,  Oct 26^th –  Nov 2^nd 2024 with a few special events, including a brief description of the NPSS history and some of its accomplishments.

While digging into its past, I found myself immersed into a fascinating voyage of technical and societal innovation, started long before the NPSS was formed. I would like to share some of the highlights with the readers, especially with the younger ones for whom it is even harder to image a world without instant connectivity and communication.

A Brief History

To understand the origin of NPSS we first need to go back to the 19^th century  and  re-trace the events that led to the establishment of today’s IEEE. The second half of the 19^th century witnessed a fundamental revolution in the way information could be transferred:  the advent of the telegraph made communications almost instantaneous rather than being constrained to the speed of human transportation. The world became much more connected and the electrical industry rapidly developed, with well-known pioneers such as Edison, Bell and Tesla playing a key role in making electricity broadly available. At the same time, the US engineering community realized they needed a formal presence in this rapidly growing technical field and in 1884 formed a first predecessor of IEEE, the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE). It is important to note that AIEE rapidly instituted regular technical meetings, publications, promotion of standards, establishment of students branches and of a code of ethics; it promoted excellence and achievement through the establishment of the grade of Fellow.  These values and approaches are still at the core of today’s IEEE. Similarly, reacting to the development  of wireless communication, the engineering community formed the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE) in 1912. Over the years, the AIEE  and IRE fields of interest became close enough to prompt a merger  of the two Institutes into the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 1963 — IEEE, as we know it today. Over time, IEEE membership expanded geographically to all continents, and the technical areas of expertise and its outreach activities became broader in scope.

Similarly to how the advent of electricity impacted the end of the 19^th century, the 1940s saw the emergence of the relevance of nuclear power;  these developments again catalyzed a response from the engineering community, ultimately leading to the formation of NPSS. The first activity on record in the nuclear field  was the formation of a Nuclear Studies Committee in the IRE in 1947, to determine the proper role of the IRE in this new technical field. Subsequently, in 1949 the Professional Group on Nuclear Science (PGNS) was formed, marking the early origins of NPSS.

The new organization became visible on a number of fronts in the early 1950s including having a strong impact on the  Atomic Energy Act of 1954. Early in the 1950s the PGNS became a co-sponsor of the Scintillation Counter Symposium, which has now merged into the Nuclear Science Symposium. 1954 also marks the first issue of the Transactions on Nuclear Science. The next milestone dates to 1963 —reflecting the merger of IRE and AIEE into IEEE, the IRE PGNS merged with the AIEE Nucleonics Committee and the Committee on Nucleonic and Radiation Instruments to become the Nuclear Science Group of the IEEE.

In 1972 two major events occurred: the scope was widened to include the plasma science field, and the group was given Society status with the NPSS  being officially formed under its present name. 1973 saw the debut of a second publication, the Transactions on Plasma Science.

From then on the scientific and technical interests of NPSS continued to evolve resulting into the eight technical areas that form the society today: Computer Applications in Nuclear and Plasma Science, Fusion Technology, Nuclear Medical and Imaging Science, Particle Accelerator Science and Technology, Plasma Science and Applications, Pulsed Power Science and Technology, Radiation Effects, Radiation Instrumentation, with a common focus on electromagnetic radiation in its many facets: production, measurement, utilization in several applications and study of its damage.

NPSS has made many impactful contributions to technology, science, education and society at large. For example, NPSS established the CAMAC and FASTBUS standards, which then impacted the development of the still currently widely used VME and microTCA standards. Development of new detectors and detector materials has fundamentally impacted research and applications in radiation detection, medical imaging, homeland security, high energy physics, geophysics and others. Medical imaging, both instrumentation and algorithms, has revolutionized management of disease and opened new career paths for engineers, while advancements in pulsed power science has led to an explosion of applications in agriculture, medicine, defense, materials and energy. In 2022 the National Ignition Facility at LLNL demonstrated first ignition, opening the door to an explosion of venture-funded investments in fusion. Plasma medicine is emerging as a new field of research that combines plasma physics, life sciences, and clinical medicine to use ionized gas for medical purposes. 

A NPSS flagship in education and outreach are the NPSS instrumentation schools held in several under-represented countries as regularly described in this Newsletter.  Besides serving an educational purpose, they also offer opportunities to increase the geographical diversity of NPSS activities by establishing new collaborations.  A newly funded initiative provides funds for selected students to attend an NPSS conference — and we had a first such awardee attend the 2024 NSS/MIC/RTSD meeting.  NPSS  also strongly believes in the value of humanitarian activities and is one of the two strongest IEEE supporters of  IEEE Smart Village. Women in Engineering, Young Professionals and DEI activities continue to be a very high priority for our Society and we strive to find innovative ways to better serve these fractions of our community.

And while we can certainly be very proud of our achievements on many fronts, there is much more to do, many ways to get involved and continue the past legacy. Many current technical and societal problems require multi-disciplinary skills to reach impactful answers: to this extent we keep fostering interactions between our technical areas as well as with other IEEE Societies and we are always open to new ideas and activities. We now have NPSS liaisons for IEEE Standards Activities, AI Coalition and Climate Change and we are in the process of establishing a DEI functional committee with expanded scope. 

The article for this Newsletter is being written before the November IEEE Technical Activities Board meeting series, so the report from that front is limited. The TAB Ad Hoc Committee on Governance Update is working on establishing a rigorous process for the removal of elected members from a position, should that be required; IEEE administration gave a description of their current efforts to improve the efficiency of conference contract handling in response to issues raised by many societies earlier in the year. More to come in the March newsletter.

New Leadership

Now a very important announcement; at the last AdCom meeting Sara Pozzi was voted as our next President and Lorenzo Fabris as the new Vice-President. Congratulations to both! And as this is my last article in my capacity as President, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to several of my AdCom colleagues, some of whom have become very dear friends. Their enthusiastic dedication to the Society’s mission and their collective wisdom are nothing short of inspiring: I experienced sincere team work, support, and a great feeling of reward when we collectively succeeded in achieving a goal promoting the Society’s objectives. And the Society is in excellent hands with the new leadership!

Note: further information about IEEE history can be found in An Overview of 125 Years of IEEE History, Sheldon Hochheiser, IEEE History Center, 5 August 2009, and information about NPSS history in the NPSS website. A video describing the history can be found at https://ieee-npss.org/videos/.

Vesna Sossi, IEEE NPSS President, can be reached by E-mail at [email protected].