Cynthia McCollough, Ph.D., director of the Mayo Clinic Computed Tomography (CT) Clinical Innovation Center, professor of medical physics and biomedical engineering, and the 2019 president of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM), explains the "building bridges" theme of the 2019 AAPM meeting.
This theme was the focus of her president’s address at the 2019 AAPM meeting. She spoke on the theme of diversity and how to break down the barriers between various minorities, male-female, religion, national origin, etc. She gave many photo examples of how we pigeon hole people into neat categories and that we often say we have equally in society, however her images showed recent images of big political summits where there are no women present, or they were the secretaries in the background. She said in medical practice, department administration and collaboration on projects, people need to be cognoscente of bias they have engrained by culture for which they may not even be aware.
She showed a slide of the AAPM membership makeup by generation and said members need to keep in mind the way each generation thinks and communicates varies by their generation's life experience and upbringing. McCollough said understanding these differences can help bridge perceived gaps in communication.
Find more news and videos from AAPM.
