Congratulations to Dr. Wesley Bolch, BME professor and Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering associate dean for academic affairs, who was recently appointed to serve a 4-year term on the Medical Imaging Drugs Advisory Committee (MIDAC) of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
The MIDAC reviews and evaluates data concerning the safety and effectiveness of marketed and investigational human drug products for use in diagnostic and therapeutic procedures using radiolabeled pharmaceuticals. The commission makes appropriate recommendations to the FDA Commissioner related to product approval.
Bolch earned his BSE degree in environmental engineering in 1984, his ME and PhD degrees in radiological physics in 1986 and 1998, respectively, from the University of Florida. He has been certified by the American Board of Health Physics since 1994 and licensed in Radiological Health Engineering by the Texas Board of Professional Engineers since 1992. In 2011, Bolch was elected Fellow of both the Health Physics Society (HPS) and the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM). He has been a member of the Society of Nuclear Medicine’s Medical Internal Radiation Dose (MIRD) Committee since 1993, a member of the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements (NCRP) since 2005, and a member of Committee 2 of the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) since 2005.
Bolch is the director for the Advanced Laboratory for Radiation Dosimetry Studies (ALRADS). He is the author of over 200 publications in the areas of external and internal radiation dosimetry. He is a Fellow of both the Health Physics Society and American Association of Physicists in Medicine and is the 2014 recipient of the Distinguished Scientific Achievement Award by the Health Physics Society. Bolch has managed a broad research program including (1) NIH and DOE funded projects to construct high-resolution models of the skeleton to support dose-response studies in radionuclide therapy and radiation epidemiology, (2) NIH-funded projects to develop scalable NURBS-based and voxel-based computational phantoms of adult and pediatric patients and associated software for organ dose assessment in nuclear medicine, computed tomography, interventional fluoroscopy and radiotherapy, (3) private company funded projects to develop stereotactic kilovoltage x-ray treatments for age-related macular degeneration and glaucoma and (4) CDC funded projects in stochastic modeling of worker inhalation and gamma-ray exposures following radiological accidents and potential terrorist events. He is the recipient of the 2014 Distinguish Scientific Achievement Award by the Health Physics Society acknowledging outstanding contributions to the science and technology of radiation safety. In 2015, Bolch traveled to Vienna to serve as a member of the U.S. delegation to the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR).
Congratulations, Dr. Bolch!