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James Dobbins III MS’83, PhD’85 Receives Lifetime Achievement Award
James Dobbins III MS’83, PhD’85 Receives Lifetime Achievement Award
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James T. Dobbins III MS’83, PhD’85, received a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023 from the Society of Directors of Academic Medical Physics Programs, Inc (SDAMPP). Dobbins, now retired, spent his entire 37-year career on the faculty and in senior administration at Duke University, where he is associate vice provost emeritus and professor emeritus of radiology, biomedical engineering, and physics. He is an internationally recognized scholar in the science of imaging, whose research has contributed to several FDA-cleared diagnostic imaging techniques now in clinical use in hundreds of hospitals worldwide. He was the founding director of the graduate program in medical physics at Duke, now one of the top three such programs in the United States. He was also part of the small team of senior administrators that designed, built, and launched Duke’s joint venture university in China — Duke Kunshan University (DKU) — which offers both graduate and undergraduate degrees to a global community of students; he also served as secretary of the DKU Board of Trustees. He is past-president of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM) and co-founder and past-president of SDAMPP. He won the Sylvia Sorkin Greenfield Award for best publication in the journal Medical Physics and is a fellow of AAPM and SPIE, the International Society for Optics and Photonics. He and his wife, Catherine N. Dobbins (former senior management at the statewide public television network in North Carolina), live in Durham, NC, and enjoy spending time with their son, Scott; daughter-in-law, Summer; and grandson, Theo, in New York City.