James T. Dobbins III, professor emeritus of Radiology, Biomedical Engineering and Physics, received a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023 from the Society of Directors of Academic Medical Physics Programs, Inc (SDAMPP).
This award recognizes his substantial contributions nationally in medical physics education.
Dobbins spent his entire 37-year career on the faculty and in senior administration at Duke, where he is Associate Vice Provost Emeritus.
He is an internationally recognized scholar in imaging science whose research in quantitative metrics for image quality is widely recognized and whose work has contributed to several FDA-cleared diagnostic imaging techniques now in clinical use in hundreds of hospitals worldwide.
Dobbins was the Founding Director of the Graduate Program in Medical Physics at Duke, now one of the top three such programs in the U.S.. 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). He also served as Secretary of the DKU Board of Trustees.
Dobbins 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 in 1996 and is a Fellow of AAPM and SPIE, the International Society for Optics and Photonics.
In 2022, Dobbins received a distinguished faculty award from the Duke Medical Physics Graduate Program and was emcee of the first-ever graduation exercises at Duke for Duke Kunshan University undergraduate degrees alongside President Vincent Price and former Provost Sally Kornbluth.
