Focus on MP: Medical Physicists Contribute to Trustee Committees
By ABR Board of Trustees Chair Matthew B. Podgorsak, PhD; future ABR Trustee Katja Langen, PhD; ABR Trustees Jennifer Stickel, PhD, and Sameer Tipnis, PhD; and ABR Associate Executive Director for Medical Physics Geoffrey S. Ibbott, PhD
August 2026;19(4):6
The American Board of Radiology is guided by two boards: the Board of Governors (BOG) and the Board of Trustees (BOT). The nine-member BOG oversees the fulfillment of the ABR’s mission and is responsible for its corporate powers, business, and affairs. The BOT currently has 24 members with specialty and subspecialty expertise: 11 diagnostic radiologists, five interventional radiologists, five radiation oncologists, and three medical physicists. Each group of Trustees oversees its discipline’s Initial and Continuing Certification programs, supporting the ABR mission to “certify that our diplomates demonstrate the requisite knowledge, skill, and understanding of their disciplines to the benefit of patients.”
Although each discipline is professionally distinct with unique assessment content, they share significant operational and programmatic overlap. To promote consistency, Trustees from all disciplines collaborate throughout the year on several committees, each addressing specific aspects of Trustee responsibility. Each Trustee serves on one to three committees. These committees include ABR staff, who provide administrative and other support, and occasionally a BOG liaison.
The current active BOT committees are listed alphabetically below, along with a brief description of each committee’s role.
Assessment Experience Committee: Makes recommendations to support accessibility, fairness, and objectivity in assessments and in the candidate and diplomate experience. As we adapt our procedures to accommodate the large number of diagnostic radiology (DR) candidates who will begin taking oral exams in 2028, this committee will ensure that the ABR maintains its current high standards.
Image Quality Committee: Supports excellence in image presentation across ABR Initial and Continuing Certification programs. This committee helps ensure that exam images follow a consistent format, are of sufficient quality, and clearly illustrate the topic being assessed.
Language and Style Committee: Approves the use of abbreviations and promotes the highest quality language usage across ABR Initial and Continuing Certification programs, helping to ensure that assessment content is clear and understandable.
Oral Exam Operations Committee: Makes recommendations on operational aspects of oral exam delivery. As the ABR prepares for the changes needed to examine DR candidates, this committee ensures that current remotely administered oral exams for interventional radiology, medical physics, and radiation oncology are delivered uniformly, consistently, and reliably.
Remote Examiner Training Working Group: Makes recommendations on the development of oral examiner training programs. As candidates and examiners have transitioned to fully remote participation over the past few years, this committee has addressed the challenges in ensuring all examiners receive and follow consistent training.
Trustee AI Committee: Makes recommendations to ABR staff and the BOG on the application of AI in ABR content optimization. The committee’s primary focus is on developing safeguards to keep ABR content proprietary and secure.
Volunteerism Committee: Develops plans to recruit and retain a robust and diverse group of volunteers at all levels. The ABR relies on approximately 1,300 volunteers to carry out its mission.
These BOT committees typically meet in person during ABR semiannual board meetings and occasionally meet remotely between board meetings. During a board meeting, each committee chair reports their activities and recommendations to the BOT. The BOT chair compiles those recommendations into a collective report for the BOG.
As noted on the ABR’s website, the BOT’s main responsibility is to guide the development and continuous improvement of ABR exams and to make recommendations to the BOG about exam structures, formats, and scoring. Given the commonality of exam features and volunteer oversight among the four disciplines, we have found it most productive if Trustees from all specialties work together on initiatives of mutual interest and impact. The BOT committees described above are well suited for these efforts, and surveys of candidates, diplomates, and volunteers have indicated that these collaborative efforts have resulted in meaningful improvements in the ABR’s evaluation programs and operations.
