Jennings, Robert
Oral history interview with Robert Jennings, 2020 June 22.
Interview with Robert Jennings, retired since 2018 from the FDAs Center for Devices and Radiological Health, where he was a research physicist. He recounts his childhood in Southern California and the formative influence of Sputnik on his physics education. Jennings discusses his undergraduate experience at Occidental and his masters work at UCLA, and he describes his postgraduate work at the NASA Ames Research Center where he worked on optical detectors. He explains his decision to pursue a PhD at Dartmouth where he studied under John Merrill and worked on Tonks-Dattner resonances. Jennings describes the circumstances leading to his postdoctoral research in Brazil at the Institute of Atomic Energy, where he worked on medical radiation in the Division of Solid-State Physics. He discusses his subsequent research with John Cameron at the University of Wisconsins Medical Physics section to develop spectroscopy systems. Jennings explains that the expertise he developed in radiation and modeling in Wisconsin served as his entrě to the FDA ,which excited him as the place where the most impactful research was happening at the time. He surveys the major projects he was involved with over his career, including human visual signal detection, quality assessment of medical devices, improving mammography diagnostics, tomosynthesis, and CT scanners. At the end of the interview, Jennings surveys the fundamental developments that have advanced over the course of his forty-plus year career at FDA, his major contributions in tissue simulation science, and why he believes AI will become increasingly central to advances in medical imaging.
Robert Jennings is a retired research physicist at the FDAs Center for Devices and Radiological Health. He completed his graduate studies at Dartmouth College and postdoctoral research at the Institute of Atomic Energy in Brazil. Prior to joining the FDA, Jennings held a research appointment at the University of Wisconsin.
Cameron, J. R. (John Roderick), 1922-
Merrill, John R.
Ames Research Center
Center for Devices and Radiological Health (U.S.)
Dartmouth College
Instituto de Pesquisas Energťicas e Nucleares (Brazil)
United States. Food and Drug Administration.
Universidade de Sô Paulo
University of California, Los Angeles
University of Wisconsin.
CT scanner.
Diagnostic imaging
Mammography -- United States.
Medical physics.
Medical radiology.
Optical detectors
Radiology
Solid state physics
X-ray spectroscopy.
Interviews. aat
Oral histories. aat
Transcripts. aat
Zierler, David, 1979- interviewer.
AIP-ICOS
American Institute of Physics. Niels Bohr Library & Archives. One Physics Ellipse, College Park, MD 20740, USA