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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
December 22, 2006

BATON ROUGE – The LSU and Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center, or MBPCC, Medical Physics and Health Physics Program has recently been granted full accreditation from the Commission on Accreditation of Medical Physics Educational Programs, Inc., or CAMPEP, becoming one of only 10 accredited programs in the U.S.

“CAMPEP accreditation demonstrates that the LSU Medical Physics and Health Physics Program meets national standards. This public acknowledgement provides national status to the program, which will help future recruitment of graduate students and faculty,” said Kenneth Hogstrom, director of the program and chief of physics at MBPCC. “Accreditation was possible due to the joint support of LSU and MBPCC for the program and the dedicated work of our faculty and staff. Our goal is to far exceed accreditation standards, which means we will continue to strive to improve the education and research components of our program.”

The medical physics program, which recently received a new endowed chair position, the Dr. Charles M. Smith Chair of Medical Physics, is a landmark achievement that combines academia with clinical medicine in order to facilitate research and assist with the nationwide shortage of medical physicists. CAMPEP accreditation will go a long way toward recruiting and attracting talented students and faculty to the university and MBPCC, an important step in addressing the shortage.

Medical physics is primarily concerned with applications of concepts and methods of physics to the diagnosis and treatment of diseases, including cancer. Medical physicists serve as integral members of cancer care teams, responsible for the highly technical aspects of radiological equipment application. They also conduct research and development to provide new and potentially life-saving advances in treatment and diagnosis.

Accreditation is a voluntary, non-governmental process of peer review utilized to verify that a particular program or institution has met uniform standards. CAMPEP’s accreditation process involves seven steps:

1. the institution applying for accreditation prepares and submits a self-evaluation;
2. the CAMPEP Graduate Education Program Review Committee reviews this self-evaluation;
3. CAMPEP then communicates any questions or concerns to the graduate education program director for a response;
4. after all questions are answered, a site visit is scheduled and conducted;
5. afterward, the CAMPEP site visit team submits its summary and recommendations to the CAMPEP Graduate Education Program Review Committee;
6. subsequently, the Review Committee submits the site visit team's summary and recommendations, together with the self-evaluation and all associated correspondence to the CAMPEP Board of Directors;
7. and, last, the CAMPEP Board of Directors makes a final decision, which is then communicated to the applicant institution.

Full accreditation is valid for five years, at which time programs are required to submit to reevaluation.

For more information regarding the Medical Physics and Health Physics Program at LSU and the Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center, please visit www.phys.lsu.edu and click on “graduate programs,” or visit www.marybird.org.