Good morning, good afternoon, good evening wherever you're watching this broadcast from. It could be anywhere because this is a real worldwide topic that we're going to be talking about today when we talk about the future of our radiation protection programs across the world and how we build capacity within that field. I'm Teresa Clark. I'm one of the senior leaders who's responsible for the Nuclear Materials Users Program here at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and we oversee the safe and secure use of radioactive materials for various uses like industrial, academic, research, and medical uses. And so we always hear that people are a precious resource, our most precious resource and we totally agree with that. And when it comes to radiation protection, making sure that we have enough health physicists and related radiation protection professionals is truly essential to meet our mission. We're looking forward to having an open and wide ranging discussion on this topic to figure out best how to inspire students to join this field, how to attract them to opportunities at state and federal agencies, and how to keep them once they're here and trained. Before I get into the details of today's session, I want to take a moment to extend special thanks to Daniel DiMarco and to Dan Strohmeier who work together to ensure that we had all the logistics arranged for this session. Daniel in particular dealt with all the checklists and the documents and the forms that had to be submitted often on tight deadlines with grace and with a positive attitude. And Dan backed up Daniel every step of the way to help out to get us ready for today. So thanks so much, we couldn't have done it without you. Slide two please. For this session, we'll have four speakers with a variety of backgrounds and responsibilities give us their initial thoughts on this topic. I'll introduce each speaker in full before they give their presentation, but you could see the names on this slide and get excited. We've got some real giants in our field today. After each presentation, you'll have a chance after the the presentations are over, then you'll have a chance to join the conversation and ask questions to shape the remainder of the discussion. Please use the Q&A box to send in your questions throughout the session. We've got a few planned of course, but we'd love to ask the questions that are of the most interest to you. During the presentations, after each speaker, you'll also be prompted to answer some live polling questions. I want to thank our health physics community here at the NRC for teaming up to develop these questions. The answers that you give will help shape our conversation and it'll also give us some good data to help us decide what future activities to take. Slide three please. While I have the floor, I am not going to miss the opportunity to highlight a few places where the NRC is actively hiring. There are two resume bank type postings open for the next several months that we're going to use to fill various openings as they come up. One's more focused on headquarters at grades 11 through 15 and one is designed for regional license reviewers and inspectors at grades 11 through 13. If you qualify for these, please use the QR codes to find them on USA jobs and put your information in. Just for your awareness, for a grade 11 job, applicants usually need a bachelor's or master's with a couple years of experience or a PhD without additional experience and the requirements go up from there to a 15, which is our highest level general staff job. That's what you'll see third on the slide, which is a public posting for a senior intergovernmental liaison PM and that's in the branch that nurtures our agreement state relationships and that one closes next week. With that, I'll introduce our first presenter, Dr. Katie Tapp, who is a medical physicist in my division. Katie joined the NRC in 2006 and currently focuses on radiation safety for emerging medical technologies and release of patients containing bioproduct material. She's also worked in other offices at the NRC, the Office of Nuclear Regulatory Research and the Office of New Reactors and as an inspector in region three near Chicago. Katie received her doctorate in medical physics from Purdue University and her bachelor's in nuclear engineering from the University of Illinois. Katie will talk about what we're doing inside the agency to recruit, train and retain health businesses. So let's go to Katie's presentation, please. Take it away, Katie. Thank you, Teresa. As Teresa mentioned, I'm Katie Tapp and I'm a medical physicist at the NRC currently. I'm going to talk today about how the NRC is building our health physics capacity for our future in radiation protection. Slide two, please. The need for health physicists and radiation protection experts is growing. We are constantly being asked new and emerging radiation protection questions as well as we're constantly evaluating things that we've done in the past with updated information and modern scientific approaches. Unfortunately, it appears the health physics capacity will shrink unless we act to promote and keep health physicists in the field. In recent years, we have seen a huge wave of staff retirements, taking with them years and years of knowledge and skills. Due to the age of the field, retirements were predicted, but it still hurts to see our friends and their knowledge go. In addition, many health physicists have left the field recently, going on to different positions elsewhere. So we need to build our capacity by hiring and training new staff. It takes time to train someone well. And at the NRC, we are finding fewer available candidates in health and medical physics fields, especially those who are fully trained already, are ready to take on immediate responsibilities. To keep our capacity strong, we also need to retain and engage the staff we have. At the NRC, we are trying to develop a lively and supportive health physics community to support retention. Slide three, please. The NRC is partnering to grow our health physics skills and expertise by maintaining a pipeline to bring in more skilled individuals, supporting development to grow the skills, and creating a community for all health physicists to share and connect. I will discuss each of these areas a little further. Slide four, please. To increase the pipeline of health physicists across the nation, the NRC provides grants to train new radiation protection professionals. This grant program provides scholarships and fellowships for students in nuclear-related fields, such as health physics. It also provides funding for faculty development. Those students who receive support must sign a service commitment to the industry. The NRC and Agreement State have recently hired individuals who have received these grants, including in areas of health physics. The NRC has also increased our outreach and recruitment activities with university champions. The champions attend job fairs and other university events, get to know the staff to share unique opportunities and jobs at the NRC. Finally, the NRC has success in hiring in related fields, such as physics or engineering, to supplement traditionally trained health physicists. The NRC provides development opportunities for those in the related fields who wish to pursue health physics related jobs. Slide five, please. Speaking of development, the NRC has numerous health physics classroom and laboratory courses. These courses are open to NRC and Agreement State staff. The NRC has courses ranging from introduction to advanced health physics. In addition, there are numerous courses in specific subject areas, such as internal distimetry, health physics statistics, medical use and byproduct material, environmental and air monitoring, and many more. The NRC has also increased the agility through cross-training health physicists across the the NRC, such as material health physics. SIST can qualify as reactor health physicists and vice versa. The NRC also supports employee rotations to promote cross-training and advancement. Finally, the NRC supports numerous external opportunities such as conference attendances and private courses for career advancement. Slide six, please. Recently, the NRC has established an agency-wide community of health physicists. The goal of this community is to strengthen our health physics network across the agency, allowing us to get to know one another and learn what others' expertise and skills are and what they're passionate about. The group establishes an internal website containing staff information and self-reported areas of expertise and areas which employees feel they can help others when needed. This page also contains a list of health physicists at the NRC who are willing to mentor others or have time to support projects specific to their skills. The group holds a monthly community meeting. These meetings are informal and virtual, which have allowed staff at all levels and locations to participate equally. At the meetings, we discuss hot topics and then virtually go around the room to share interesting radiation protection projects we're all working on. As someone who works in a very specific area at the NRC, I have learned a great deal about other interesting projects or issues ongoing throughout the NRC, which I might not have known about otherwise. These meetings give us a chance for the community to give advice to other members when they're working on a difficult question. During these meetings, I have also found that some of my regulatory or technical questions specific to my area, which is medical, are actually very similar to others who are working in different areas. Even like reactors in medical, we are finding things that are in common and this allows us to work together and collaborate. Finally, this group has established an agency-wide certified health physics study group. The group meets routinely to keep each other on a study schedule and discuss problems so they are prepared to take the CHP exam this year. I wish them all luck. Slide seven, please. Finally, we are working to increase our health physics capacity through external partnerships with others such as the International Atomic Energy Agency and the National Council of Radiation Protection and Measurements. Also, many staff are in professional societies such as the Health Physics Society. The NRC supports staff participating in conferences and on relevant committees, working groups, and more when staff is interested and there is a safety need and the NRC need. Finally, we are working with the Conference of Radiation Control Protect Program Directors, or CRCPD, to design a framework for resource matching programs that would provide development rotations and or allow qualified staff in one jurisdiction to temporary fill a need in another. Through all these efforts, the NRC continues to build our health physics capacity to support our needs. This is the end of my presentation and I look forward to the panel discussion. Thank you. Thanks so much, Katie, and although she was probably too modest to mention it, she's one of the real leaders behind that community program that you just heard about along with Vince Hollahan, John Tome, and many others who make those meetings sparkle every month. So thank you, Katie. So now we'll be pulling up our first polling question before we get to our next speaker and hopefully you'll be able to see that shortly and we'd love to hear your thoughts on whether you've had difficulty keeping your health physics capabilities. As Katie mentioned, during retirements or people shifting to other fields, getting promoted, etc. So feel free to give us your thoughts on that and that'll help shape the rest of the discussion. I think that that poll will be live on the side pane of where you're seeing this window for the next little while. We can see those answers as they start to fill in. At least one person answered. Now the answers are coming in. Thanks, everyone. So we're seeing definitely people endorsing what Katie was saying about having struggles, finding people, finding qualified candidates to hire. A couple of people are worried about the future but aren't quite there yet. And so hopefully some of what we're talking about today will help you at least get some ideas for how we can use those worries. And hardly anyone is in categories A and B, which is very interesting. So keep clicking through those polls. I think that'll be active for a little while longer until we put up the next poll question and we'll use these answers as we shape the conversation. So I'll introduce our next speaker now. Our next speaker is Angela Leek. Angela is the Radiation Control Program Director for the Iowa State Program. She's also the chair of the Conference of Radiation Control Program Directors or CRCPD, which Katie mentioned a minute ago. And she's a certified health physicist. Angela has a master's in Radiation Health Physics from Oregon State and she's working on a PhD at Iowa State. Angela is going to talk about state perspectives on the health physics career field and in particular what CRCPD has cooking. So let's swap to Angela's presentation, please. And Angela, the floor is yours. Great. Thank you so much, Theresa. We really appreciate the opportunity to participate today as has been mentioned and I think everyone is indicating on the poll. This is on the forefront of everyone's minds to ensure that we can continue our radiation protection activities that have been vital over the past decades as we move forward. And everyone who has shaped where we're at today goes off to enjoy their well-deserved retirement. So CRCPD, as Katie did a great job of setting up, is working closely with the NRC as well as many of our other partners from the Health Physics Society and our other associations to try to see what we can do to work on this effort. And we do appreciate all the work the NRC is doing that Katie outlined really nicely as far as adding HP as well as the states to the scholarship programs and also allowing for the training for our state staff as we bring in agreement state staff. All of the training that is provided by the NRC is vital to bringing those people up to speed and being ready to do our radiation protection activities. So before I get started too much, I'm not sure if everyone is familiar with the CRCPD or what we do and how we coordinate across the states. So the CRCPD is a non-profit organization, a 501C3, and we are comprised of membership of many radiation professionals, but really primarily focused on state and local government. So our voting members are our radiation control program directors from each of our states. And each state though has their own jurisdiction, as you probably are aware. We all have our own regulations, maintain our programs and regulations independently, and we overall have the same radiation protection goals, similar in nature to all of our other federal agencies. However, we do individually in each of our states have focus areas based off of local environmental considerations, industries that we have common in our state, or political priorities within each of our states. So that lets us have a diverse yet networked group of unique individuals and states that come together. And CRCPD's role is to try to bring us together under one hat and promote consistent radiation protection practices, provide leadership and radiation issues, especially as we have new and emerging issues, improve efficiency and providing radiation protection, and enhance the relationship among all of our members from states to other other associations that we're affiliated with. So importantly here, all of the hiring, all of the responsibilities, all of the regulations stay within each of the states. So CRCPD doesn't provide funds, they don't provide staff. We provide suggested state regulations, but we don't mandate those states don't necessarily have to use the regulations in the exact way they are. So we're not exactly like the NRC is for the materials program where agreement states do have to be compatible. Our suggested state regulations allow states to be a little bit more diverse. So our goal really is to bring the states together to find those commonalities. So what that does is puts us in a great position to bring all the states together to find solutions for issues just like what we're talking about today. Next slide please, slide two. So as we've been discussing specifically with the NRC, but also with many of our other partners in the HPS and other health physics related entities, we are excited to see all the work and support and the efforts that are underway to help sustain and increase our workforces. And we're very happy to have our federal partners and our other entities reaching out to offer assistance and ask for the state's input. And we really look forward to how this is going to go forward. As our part of this, we are seeing a lot of work being done to grow and sustain the existing workforce. And where we want to focus with CRCPD is looking to the priorities that we can affect most quickly. And that is filling the gaps that are going to be in place when we move our efforts forward. We know that it's going to take time, even if we have all of these efforts successfully bringing in new students and new graduates and new trainees and new staff on all of our staffs. We have a lot of experience. People that are retiring have had decades of experience and exposure to different types of radiation protection issues and the development of many of the things that we're leaning on today. And it will take time for the new people to get up to speed to provide that same sort of expertise and oversight. So we're trying to identify opportunities for mentoring and training staff across the states in conjunction with the NRC for sure in the National Materials Program. And as Katie mentioned, we want to try to figure out ways that we can most easily share for two ways, for development of our staff. So if a state has expertise, as I mentioned, maybe they have a lot of expertise in something to do with radium because they have some legacy radium cleanup in their state. Or they have a lot of a large medical facility that has a proton center or something very specialized. And another state loses that staff person and that expertise. As they hire new people in, they can more easily send people to those facilities or to those states to get that experience, to talk to an experienced person, because it's very unlikely that any individual state will have or retain that expertise at the same time. So we want to clear the pathways for that. We want to make it easy. We want to just be a phone call or a really quick setup to be able to network that. In addition, if we do find ourselves in a position where we don't have enough staff or all of our staff are in a training mode, how can we actually use other states or the NRC staff to fill those qualified gaps while we bring our trainees up to speed? Because it can take quite a while for us to get our staff up to speed and fully qualified per our requirements. And in addition to that, when we talk about this, many of you or many that are thinking of this, think this happens already. And it does. We're really fortunate in our community to have a really strong network and to leverage across and everyone is open to sharing the resources and helping where we can. But as time moves forward, we're all going to get tighter and we're not going to be able to volunteer as much time. We may be strapped for resources and we may have new radiation control program directors who don't know the network. They don't have those established relationships. So we need an easy way for them to be able to tap into which states have which expertise and how they can navigate that within their state structure. So can we do template agreements? Can we allow kind of a reciprocity type of an consideration where we're not having to requalify someone if we want to use some other state staff? When you borrow that staff through this agreement, it comes with that that qualification comes with that person. Slide three. So as we're working on this, and we again are just kicking this off at the CRCPD with a new workforce development and coordination committee. And we've, I want to thank Joe Nick and Sarah from the NRC and Sarah Sanderland from New Jersey who have been willing to co-chair this committee and get things kicking off on these efforts to find ways to streamline what I just described. The working group is charged with the following items. We're going to try to develop that process for sharing experience staff in that resource deficient environment. And again, that framework is the important piece that we're talking about here. It's not that we won't share already. We want to make it easier. We want to make it clearer. We also want to facilitate growth opportunities for health physics skills and identify educational opportunities for our radiological program staff. That includes tapping into our academia partners as well as the NRC and other training modules that might be available with our federal entities. We also want to identify issues that might arise from credentialing or reciprocity and try again to, as I mentioned before, identify the mechanisms that will help us best share those resources and to reduce the amount of paperwork that might be needed to actually get that done. And then we want to maintain awareness of where the resources are in the state. And that goes back to that network, that kind of catalog for lack of a better term of what resources are available in each state, what expertise and what level of availability each state might have for capacity of training or sharing resources. So, you know, we will adjust and grow these charges and these topics as the committee figures out where we stand and where our niche can be on these short-term goals. And we really are glad to be in partnership with the NRC, with all of our other partners in the health physics and radiation protection communities. And we look forward to seeing strong effort and partnership as we go forward. Thank you. Thank you so much for that overview, Angela. We're really grateful for your partnership with the NRC. And in particular, I'll just offer, I did an interagency rotation in 2019 and I found it really eye-opening and personally rewarding. And having these sorts of developmental rotations as well as meeting particular state needs is something that I'm personally very interested in. So, I look forward to hearing more about that as that team develops. So, we're going to throw up our second poll now. This polling question is focused really on retention. I think everybody's mentioned retention as an essential component. We can't just be hiring new people every year. We need to make the ones that we have happy. So, we'll be curious to see what you have to say about what the most important factors are either for you or for your staff regarding job satisfaction. And we've got a variety of options up there. So, put your answers in and again, we'll use this in the conversation later on with the rest of the panel. So far, people are excited about having exciting work, which I think is something that Katie mentioned earlier. She certainly works in an area that's constantly changing and evolving. The location and telework is definitely a big topic. And we'll be curious to see if other people click in with answers in other areas. I see those bars shifting. Workload, salary. I'd like to see extra people answering. Thank you so much for answering this poll. It's going to be very useful for us. One of the things we're really focused on here at the NRC, as I mentioned, is these retention things and how we can both emphasize what's attractive about the NRC to new folks and keep happy the ones that we have here. So, thanks for answering that question. Keep clicking it. You should be able to see it on the right hand strip in your browser as you're watching this. And by the way, I see a couple questions chime in in the Q&A box. Please keep those questions coming. We will be using them later on as we have the panel discussion. And so now I'll go while you keep quick polling. I will introduce our next speaker. So, next up, we will have the Dr. Kathy Held. Kathy is the president of the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements, or NCRP. She's also an associate radiation biologist in the department of radiation oncology at Mass General Hospital and associate professor of radiation oncology, radiation biology at Harvard Medical School. Kathy earned her PhD in biology from the University of Texas, Austin. And for several years, NCRP and its partner organizations have been sounding the alarm that there aren't enough radiation protection professionals. And Kathy's going to update us on how NCRP is helping us to meet this challenge. So, take it away, Kathy. Thank you very much. I'm very glad to be here. And I want to thank the organizers for asking us to participate in this really important discussion. If I could have the next slide, please. I'm going to start out with a quick overview to tell, make sure you all understand a little bit about NCRP and then go into some of our recent activities in this area. So, NCRP has been around for over 90 years now. We're an organization chartered by Congress in 1964. And we have 100 members as dictated by our charter. But next slide shows that our mission is to support radiation protection by providing independent scientific analysis. And I stress that word because we develop our recommendations and guidance independently of the government agencies or organizations that may fund our work. And I also want to stress that we make recommendations and guidance. We're not a regulatory agency like the NRC or the EPA. But we depend on a consensus developed by our many volunteers of leading scientists in the radiation sciences to develop our recommendations. Next slide, please. Just summarizes that NCRP council members are selected because of their scientific expertise, not representing any specific agencies or organizations. And most of the work that NCRP does is done by volunteers, hundreds and hundreds of hours a year by the people who serve as our members, who serve on our various scientific committees and our board and our program area committees, and do reviewing and development of our documents. We cover many, many areas of science. And so, as listed in the next slide, please, slide five. This is here because I want to emphasize I know this session is talking about workforce for health physicists. But I think it's very, very important for us to keep in mind that health physics is underpinned by a very broad range of expertise. And that's what NCRP seeks to have in our membership and involved in all our work. And that we feel is really critical for the development of the health physics workforce. You've got to have radiation biologists. That's me, so I'm going to list that first. But epidemiologists, physicians, risk analysis people, radiochemists, as well as the health and medical physicists in the field. And so, NCRP, we have been very concerned about all of these underpinning radiation sciences areas of expertise and the workforces there, as well as health physics, because that has such a large impact on what happens in radiation protection and in health physics. And so, one of our first activities a few years ago into this, next slide, please, was in 2013 when we helped organize, sponsor a workshop that was held and you'll recognize a number of the people probably here in this audience that were involved in the workshop. We had this workshop entitled, Where are the Radiation Professionals Warp? And since then, NCRP has talked about warp. And this is, as a result of that workshop, we published a statement in early 2015. That's available on our website for you to look at. There were some of the recommendations from this workforce. Some of the recommendations from this meeting about workforce in the broad radiation sciences areas. So NCRP has followed up on that. Next slide, please, with setting up what we call Council Committee 2, meeting the needs of the nation for radiation protection in terms of the workforce underpinning radiation protection. So the goal of this long, what we anticipate as being a long standing committee is to assess, revise and renew the plan started with warp, to look at radiation fields and the dwindling numbers of radiation professionals in many areas. And we're concerned about government, academia, medicine, private sector industry, the wide range of areas that employ people in the radiation sciences, as well as the types of individuals. So what this committee decided to do is the first undertaking was to develop a commentary, which they're currently writing, on the guidance for the radiation protection workforce. And they have separate chapters on medical physics, radiation biology, health physics, radiation, radiochemistry, nuclear engineering, radiation epidemiology, and are developing, looking at the workforces and making recommendations as they can in all of these areas. One of the big challenges that this committee has encountered, and I think probably some of the rest of you have also, in trying to make recommendations and assess the workforce, is that there really is a limited amount of solid, quantitative data in some areas on the workforces. In some cases, that's because it's a very rapidly diminishing and small workforces. And again, I speak from experience with radiation biology, radiation epidemiology are small areas. They're vital. I need, I argue for underpinning what health physicists do, but we are rapidly losing those workforces, but we don't really have good numbers, which is a challenge. One of the other challenges, as shown in the next slide, please, that we are addressing and becoming acutely aware of in the last few years, is the need to increase the diversity, inclusion, equity in our workforces. Again, all of these workforces that I've been talking about in the Radiation Sciences. There was a very interesting session at the Urban North America Regional Congress a couple of weeks ago, specifically on how we could increase diversity and inclusion in the Health, Physics, and Radiation Sciences workforce. And I think a couple of the things that I brought out, I had as take-homes from that, was really that we all need to be increasingly aware of the need to work on diversity in our workforces, and particularly to try to increase the participation of younger, more diverse individuals. That's building a pipeline. And it's been really interesting to hear the comments from the first two speakers about how their organizations are attempting to approach that. And NCRP is very eager to help to support such efforts with internship programs, mentorship programs, and we'd be glad to work in innovative approaches interacting with all of you to try to develop new approaches for strengthening not just the Health Physics workforce, if I could make this argument again, but in all of the Radiation Sciences. And with that, my last slide just says my thank you, and I'm looking forward to the panel discussion. Thank you. Thanks so much, Kathy. And for the leadership that your organization brings to this issue and the structures or the products that you put out, we find that really useful. And I look forward to exploring that more in the Q&A. So let's throw up our third and final full question. And this is really about the helps people are already answering. Awesome. This is about the how people get trained and developed to the best in your view. So what do you feel is the most beneficial way for staff to gain the necessary Health Physics knowledge? Is it on the job out there doing it every day? Rotations like Angela talked about. Conferences and mentoring like Katie talked about. And Katie also talked about training classes. So be interested to see your thoughts there. Looks like fieldwork is really high on people's minds as well as on the job training, which is pretty similar. Just depends on the location there. So appreciate getting that feedback there. And again, thanks to our team of HPs here at the NRC who put these questions together. These are questions that are hot on their minds. And I see a few more people clicking in. So thanks for doing that. And you can keep answering. And we'll pull these up as we need to during the Q&A. A lot of votes coming in for mentoring. So that's good to see. Thanks for that. All right. So our fourth and final speaker is Dr. Tom Johnson of Colorado State University. And Dr. Johnson has researched and taught in various areas of radiation safety for over 25 years. And I'll highlight that Colorado State is one of the universities that the NRC has given grants to in the past for scholarships and curriculum development. And this grant program which Katie mentioned briefly is one of our most important pathways to develop and recruit new employees. Selfishly, we love to hire people from that grants program. And Tom will speak about his perspectives in educating the next cohorts of radiation protection professionals. So Tom, over to you. Well, thank you. I really appreciate inviting me to do this. I'm a little dyslexic. So when I first read this, I thought it said health physicists untie, which I thought was going to be a super cool topic. But I read it a little more closely. So it's health physics unite. So that's, well, interesting, probably not as interesting as health physicists untieing. The next slide, please. And this actually fits into kind of the questions that you were asking in your poll earlier. Training is not the same as education. You know, we often talk about training and we can train people to do things. But a lot of people ask me what's the difference between training and education. So education, we look a little bit deeper than learning how to do something, which is what was in that poll, you know, going out in the field and seeing how to do something. Education would be a deeper understanding of the theoretical underpinnings of what we do. And more importantly, why we do it. So it's not just following a checklist or seeing how something is done. It's looking into more of the underpinnings of why is it done this way and what would be the things that go into this as far as theory goes? Another thing I wanted to emphasize is certification is important. And I noted that you have a certification working group that's awesome. This is exactly what I think our profession needs more of is people working together to become certified to raise our education level so that we can better understand the challenges that are facing us in the future. Another big problem, well, maybe not a problem, it depends on your perception is that there's no real specific job code for health physicists in the federal government. As you noted earlier, Teresa had a great job announcement there. And one of the job announcements is physical scientists, which is where health physicists is typically categorized, there's no specific code for a health physicist. And general scientists can fill these requirements and quite often do. And that is probably important right now because the shortages we're seeing. What we're seeing out in the field though, is that health physics is being slowly changed from a profession where you need an education to where one where you follow checklist. Because of the restrictions that are being put into place, because of the lack of health physicists, what we see now more and more is no scientific judgment. It's an outright following of checklist. For example, in the new regs, it says that you need to follow the new reg unless you come up with scientific information that would demonstrate a better way to show radiation safety and compliance with the regulations. Unfortunately, a lot of people now feel that you must follow the new regs verbatim. And there should be no deviation from this because we've become a checklist society. Right now, I can tell you there are very few graduate programs out there. There are five ABET accredited programs. And there are a tremendous number of openings in health physics right now. Let's go to the next slide. Now, Dr. Held talked about how there's not a lot of data out there. And I've been working with the editor of operational radiation safety as an alum of our program, Dr. Craig Little. And we've been collecting job announcements. And in fact, I've been collecting job announcements now for over 15 years. And we've been trying to track the trends as to what's going on. Now, last year, we did some tracking on this just out of curiosity to see what would happen and see how many job announcements were there, unique job announcements, over a period, an eight month period of time. Next slide, please. And I can tell you this trend has not changed. That eight month we selected had 643 unique job announcements for health physicists. And I can tell you, I just sent out job announcements this morning to our alumni. And this is not changed. In that eight months, there are 125 denoted as technician jobs and 194 for health physicists. And the job titles varied tremendously. But what we looked for more so was job description. And the job descriptions we reviewed pretty carefully to make sure that we didn't include anything with nuclear engineering or medical physicists, because we wanted to see what is going on in the health physics profession. And what we found is that we're getting about 80 unique postings per month with about 16 for technicians and 64 for professionals every single month. Now, this is nationwide. And I can tell you that this has not changed. If anything, it's gotten worse. We've seen more and more job announcements. I'm sending out probably on average almost 100 unique job announcements per month in health physics. And I can tell you, we are not graduating 100 people per month. At best, I think we would be graduating between four and five students per year right now. And a lot of this is due to the wonderful programs the NRC has provided us with for funding students. If you go to the next slide, you can see where people are getting these announcements at. So these are the announcements. You can see a lot of them are for industry and other. So it's not just the federal government. It's not just national labs that are hiring, although these are the bulk of the hires. One of the things I can tell you is state government jobs tend to be significantly lower pay than any of the other jobs. And because of that, it's very difficult for them to attract any health physicists that have had formal education. The higher paying jobs tend to be at the national laboratories. And this is what attracts the bulk of our students. They tend to go to the national laboratories. As far as what attracts people to come into the program, funding certainly is a key thing. But I can tell you that it's become extremely difficult to attract any students. The other professions are much better advertised and most people know what a computer scientist does or a hedge fund manager, these other professions where people go in that have the high skills that we need. And we're simply, I'm not going to say outbid, but we're out advertised. I think we're one of the best kept secrets that's out there. And with that, I'll conclude my presentation if someone has any questions. And thank you very much again for inviting me. I really appreciate the chance to speak here. Thanks so much, Tom. I really appreciate you highlighting those issues. I think we're already getting a bunch of questions in the Q&A box. Please keep your questions coming because now we have reached the Q&A portion of the presentation. So we can have all the panelists here for Q&A and I will moderate. And I have a few questions already to get us started. So I'll mention one just because it was very relevant to what Dr. Johnson just presented on the job code for health physicists. And we got a question in the Q&A and I was going to mention as well. There is a specific series for health physicists that we use here at the NRC. That's the 1306 series. So while you were talking, I went into USA Jobs and I searched for 1306 and I saw something like 16 jobs pop up. What that doesn't cover, however, is the other related fields that Kathy mentioned. So at the NRC, our radiation biologists are quick to jump up and say that's what they are. They're not health physicists. They're radiation biologists. And so that would fall under a scientific series, as you mentioned, Tom. So just want to mention that. And so folks are out there searching on USA Jobs or in other sites. They may be able to look for that 1306 series. So let me start off with what might be a toughie. Maybe I'll point it to Angela first. And so Tom just mentioned the pay in state government. And I saw you nodding along when we were off the stage. And so what thoughts do you have on that? How do you attract and retain people when pay might not be the motivator, but there might be lots of other motivators to come work for the state? Yeah, thanks so much. You know, the thought that jumped right to my mind and Tom was spot on with that. That's one of the reasons that we are focusing on CRCPD on what can we do to fill the gaps. We know that there will be gaps. And when we feel them, the states are probably the first ones to feel it, because we are not going to have the money to or the resources to attract. So what we try to leverage is there are people that want to work local. Some, depending on what agency we're in, we could be an environmental protection, we could be in public health, and we are all over different agencies. And so we try to say, you're going into your neighborhood and helping your family and friends and the public service aspect of the job. But that only speaks so far to someone trying to make money in a career. But there is value in the state's programs and what the states are able to do. And I think that if we can leverage certain expertise that might be more, you know, the people with the stronger education are going to the national labs or going to these other places, that's where we want to find ways to leverage in so that we can train staff. And if one of the states is lucky enough to entice someone to come to work for them for those public service and other local needs at a lower pay than they could get somewhere else, then we can all leverage that knowledge as well. So we do realize, and there's not a lot we can do about that within our various states. Again, there's influences that drive that. But we are all looking at that and working on that as well. Thanks, Angela. And it's something the NRC is thinking about too. You know, we're hooked to our federal pay scales, but we see the same sort of public service motivation, you know, and helping. So we were trying to emphasize those talking points when we market our opportunities and not focus solely on pay, which is something that's obviously easy to compare. Sort of along those lines, we've got a question here, Tom, from the audience about how you're helping advertise job postings. How can we better advertise? What sort of outside the box ideas do either you or anyone else on the panel have for how to make our positions known to folks? I wish I had an answer for you. I don't think the problem is making the positions known. It's getting people qualified. It's actually getting people into the program. And I wish someone could give me some help advertising the different programs. That's really the biggest problem, I think. Thanks. I'm definitely going to have a question on that. Anyone else from the panel want to add in on advertising current vacancies and creative ways we can do that? I know for us, we're trying to use our agency and personal social media a little bit more. We've been sharing postings with communities outside the NRC, like veterans and with the states and that sort of thing. So hopefully collectively, if there are qualified folks out there to Tom's point, we can get the word out to them and not miss them for an opportunity that they'd be interested in. Teresa, I'll add in there that also to the state perspective, some of what we try to do is leverage the networks that are within the state. So some of our existing staff, obviously some of the draws, people that want to stay in the area want to live in Iowa. And so we try to leverage through those networks with the opportunity of learning or getting education or those sorts of things. So I try to, when I'm recruiting someone who might be coming from a very specific radiation protection field, help them find areas that they're interested in because our programs cover the broad spectrum of the regulatory world of radiation protection as well as emergency response. And so if they find something that they're really interested in, I'm supporting them to go get college education, to go get specific certifications and those sorts of things and try to make it possible for them to do while they're doing the job that I need them to do as well. Thanks, Angela. So now for the thought of advertising to people before they're in college or done with college. Do any of you have thoughts on what we can do at perhaps the high school or even middle school level to get people interested in these career fields? We don't want to wait until it's too late to get people excited, although maybe it's never too late. Are there, for example, already activities underway with teachers or with state curriculum development that we that you're aware of that we might be able to expand? Anyone can answer? I can answer a little bit. We've run high school programs now for at least 15 years at Colorado State University. We've I've been involved in teachers workshops back since about 2000. And I can tell you I've tracked who's come into at least Colorado State University. And we have not had a single student come to the university based on any of our efforts at the high school level. And that's unfortunate, but true. I don't know if any of them have entered the profession. I tried to track that, but we've had absolutely dismal results. We've worked with Colorado Mount. We've worked with, let's see, multiple high schools in Colorado. We work with the schools in New Mexico, and we've had absolutely zero results in recruiting at that level. Well, that's too bad. Anyone else have ideas or different outcomes that they want to share? I might have something to share just from historical knowledge. And, granted, I was in high school a long time ago now, dating myself. But I actually joined nuclear engineering straight out of high school and interested in that because when my brother applied to the university ahead of me, he didn't get into his engineering field, but they sent back saying he could go to any other engineering field at the school and they sent a flyer. The nuclear engineering program sent a flyer with it, and I remembered seeing that. And it was an interesting flyer just for pictures and whatnot. And the advertisement really sold me on seeing something was interesting to me. And actually looking, thinking back on that flyer, it was a lot of health physics pictures because it was people taking surveys out in the field that looked nice. And as an adventure person, they sold it that way, which I thought was interesting. So really just getting pictures out there of health physicists at work in the high school level could entice a few people to at least start looking into the field and considering it. But I'm a little shocked that going to the high school level, it hasn't drawn people into you. I would have thought that would have worked differently. So that would have been my first thought. I don't know, maybe it's just me. Thanks, Katie, for that. No, I'm sure that's not the case. And that reminds me so, true confessions. I'm not a health physicist, I'm a materials engineer, at least by degree. And we had some of the same challenges in recruiting for our very small materials engineering program at my university. And we very actively went after undeclared engineering majors to say, you've probably never heard of this. Here's materials, here's free pizza, here's, you know, some information about the field, and we got a lot of people that way. So there may be adjacent fields that we can draw people in reports too late. I think Tom mentioned earlier, you know, that we're the best kept secret is spot on. I think we need to create characters or something that people can resonate with. When you say x-ray tech, people have had an x-ray and they can imagine what that person's doing every day. When you say, you know, nuclear engineer, people who aren't in our field don't know what you would do every day and they wonder, are you just pushing paperwork? What are you doing? And so I think if we could create little snippets of what people could resonate with when they see those terms. But we're really a complicated field, so that's hard to do and we're very diverse. But if we could start parsing it down and targeting people when they're younger and thinking about their careers, they might select it knowing kind of what they're getting into potentially. So I think that's a good idea for us to do. Yeah, those diversity of opportunities is a real selling point, especially for people who don't want to lock into doing the same thing for the next 30, 40, 50 years. And there's a lot that you can do with these fields. And I'll go back to you for a second. One of our sharp-eyed commenters noticed that we have had some rotations in the past between states and the NRC. It may be like 10 years since we did one with the state and some of that's probably just due to, you know, our reduction for a while in entry-level hiring when people are really looking for these rotations. But Angela, can you talk a little bit about what already has happened that might form a model for other things going forward? Yeah, for sure. I mean, just, you know, in a high-level generality, the NRC, in agreement states, partnership has been really strong. And there's been a lot of work to leverage across the national materials program, especially in the last decades. As far as specific rotations, as fellowship rotations, things like that, I can't point to names or states specifically, but you're right. There have been opportunities where both directions have occurred. But more recently, what I'm aware of, I know we've had a couple of agreement states that have had new staff rotation. And the NRC, I think, to Nebraska has really recently deployed someone there to help train some of their staff and help them with some of the work there. And I think we're going to talk about that at our organization of agreement states meeting coming up as well. So there are things underway, and states are leveraging. But right now it is kind of who you know to call. So if you're an experienced Radiation Control Program Director, or you've been with a state program for quite a while, you know to call your neighboring state or your friend across the way that you met at a conference. And of course, we haven't been able to go to conferences to create those networks as most as efficiently and as effectively as we have in the past. So you know, helping, I think what we want to try to do is to help foster those engagements, foster those connections, so that when someone needs something, we can foster more of that to happen. But it has happened quite a bit and very effectively. So we have a good foundation to build on. Thanks, Angela. So Kathy, I want to bring you into the conversation. One of our listeners, thanks you for mentioning diversity, equity and inclusion, and was wondering how exactly do you envision us achieving these goals either, you know, through what your organization is doing or ways that any of us can do better in this area? I think that's that's the key question right now, isn't it, is to figure out how to do that. And that was was really some interesting discussions that went on, as I mentioned at the the ERPA Congress, and Angela was part of that too, a couple of weeks ago. I think we're all asking that question, how do we achieve better diversity? And the main thing I can can think of that we're trying to facilitate is really getting at these these younger people and building a pipeline and identifying a more diverse audience, a more diverse studentship that we can attract to our field. I don't have any magic bullets for how we do that. That's the frustrating part of all of this. And I think to some degree, Angela's just sort of alluded to it. It comes down to personal interactions. Each each one of us in all our organizations needs to strive to make the personal connections with younger people, with women, with minorities, and and foster bringing them into the field, making them feel welcome in the field, and developing their their expertise and most importantly, their interest. Can I ask a question? Sure. I have a question really, but because of something Tom mentioned, and that that was the idea of, you know, the difference between training versus education, and that he thinks health physics is really going towards checklists and everything is training, you know, train how to check off your checklist. Is that is that impacting the interest in the job? I mean, does that make people less wanting to do a job where all they do is go down a checklist and check things off and check things off, where they'd rather have a job where they are educated and they can think and and and apply their knowledge and and understanding to problems rather than going down through checklists. Do you think that's part of the problem now with with some of our fields? Nobody's gonna nobody's gonna try to answer that. I'll go out on a limb. I don't think it is a problem because I can't I just can't get people to come into the program or even apply. We have trouble getting anyone even to apply to our program. The there's so much competition and I can tell you are a really big competition, I think, is engineering and the other sciences. They do a better job of promoting what they do. They you can see it. Someone says mechanical engineer, they kind of know what that is, and they're going to go in that direction. And these as as it was said earlier, these are our people that we'd like to see the undeclared engineering majors are perfect candidates for us. We scare off a lot of people because we've got calculus requirements, we've got physics requirements, and the people who can do that know about other professions and they tend to go with what they know rather than something they don't know. And I don't even think we get looked at. And I don't I'm not and what I'm worried about is I can't get an undiverse population to apply, let alone a diverse population. So if I can't get anyone, I'll be honest, we had we've have this fall. I think we've got four students starting in our graduate program. And that's radio, chemistry, health, physics and radio ecology. And that's four students. And we have much more capacity than that. And it's, it's dismal. I think we had 20 applications to our program total for the fall. And I saw you nodding along when Kathy was asking her question. I know you've done some work where you've you really had to think outside the box and outside the checklist. Do you want to add in? Yeah, I do. I do think this is a problem for retention. I think when I first started, I thought a lot of the questions were already solved. And it wasn't as exciting. I know I hear that from staff in different areas. Once I got a little farther up and actually had to apply knowledge, I find it so exciting. So to me, exciting work is probably the most important thing. I know it varies to people and maybe that polling question could answer some of this. But if I had to do checklist every day, I probably wouldn't have stayed in the field. That's for me. So I'll jump in here too. I think that the checklist world that we've come into, I think, is a result of us needing to continue to make sure we have a basis of consistency and the ability to keep that basic radiation protection in place. But I think if we can sell it and we can foster more engagement, we can offer more flexibility. And I think also creating that network. So when I think about Iowa, we don't have any big fancy national labs. The closest would be into Chicago. We don't have big industries that are specific to radiation except for maybe a nuclear power plant. And so if we wanted to try to entice people to go to a program, but they knew they wanted to come back to Iowa or to a state like Iowa that doesn't have that job, I think they can't figure out what job they would get. And then when they do look at what jobs there are at the state, they don't pay very well. And so then they're enticed to go to another career path. But if they would just start down the career path, they would see the open diverse application of the type of things that they could do with that knowledge base. So if we could just get them in, and I think if we can create this network, what we're trying to do with CRCPD to show that, look, you might work in Iowa, you might work somewhere in Iowa, but you have the ability to tap in and work very closely with the NRC and influence things in the NRC. And you have the ability to work closely with your university to provide this sort of education and feedback or research or something that keeps them engaged in that technical knowledge that brought them there, even if they are in a position that isn't as fully diverse and engaging as they would have liked. We can create opportunities with each other when one of us can't do it on our own. Thanks, Angela, for that. And since one of you mentioned the polling question, if one of our techs is able to pull up polling question two, I'd be curious to see what the results were because I think challenging and exciting work was pretty high up there. Yeah, that one there. So location is important. And Angela was mentioning that. If you grew up in Iowa and you want to keep working in Iowa, then that's going to be a big factor. And I think Angela will be really glad about that. But challenging and exciting work is right there. So that seems like something that we all can focus on when we're describing our field and talking about that breadth of opportunities that are there in our field. So thanks for bringing that poll up for a second. Let's see. Angela, I don't want to keep going to you, but there's sort of an interesting related question. And this is perhaps partly for the NRC, but the questioner directed it to you. What are your thoughts on cross-training folks who were in a reactor focused health physics area into a materials focused health physics area and vice versa? And I can speak to what the NRC is doing, but I'm more curious on your thoughts first. Yeah, I think that's a very specific application from the reactor to the materials and vice versa. But I think as was spoken to by Tom and Kathy, there are all types of radiation protection activities happening and that are foundational to what health physics is. So I think that there is a core knowledge and if we can make sure that those understandings are in place for our health physicists or for our radiation biologists or whoever's coming in and they've got those core capabilities, having the ability to go to an area that interests you or help cover an area that's different, it grows you, gives you a different perspective on how the world works on that side of either industry or regulation or whatever you might be in. And I think that that it should be fostered. We should try to do that as much as we can. But again, I think that that interest is the big piece, right? If somebody's being cross-trained into something they're not interested in, that's not going to be fun for them. So how do we balance that where we have the need and we have the desire of the individual? Thanks for that. And KDS, are you nodding too? You mentioned this in your presentation. Maybe you have a thought from our HP community here at the NRC, which includes folks in those specialties. Yeah, and I'll just piggyback what Angela just said. It's really about interest. And for those interested in learning about different areas, if they have the core knowledge, it's working really well. And it's allowing people to maybe just look into another side of the house, another specialty or subspecialty of health physics and learn more. They could either then move into that or use that knowledge they gained there to support their area. So we're finding that it's really helpful for people who are interested in it, helping them retain knowledge from different areas and move it around. And I think some people are really excited to try something new just for a little bit. And it helps maybe when they're in a little lag or just feeling like they've been in one place for a while just to kind of branch out and learn a little bit more. So it does help with retention as well. I've heard a lot of people excited to learn a little bit new things, even if they don't plan to stay. Thanks, Katie. Thanks for adding that perspective. Kathy, a question for you. As folks who are listening along to your presentation, they heard you describe this 2013 workshop and a report from 2015, which frankly was raising a lot of the same issues that we're talking about here today. What opportunities have we missed? What recommendations were there in that time frame that maybe we didn't capitalize on as much as we could have? We're still talking about this. And so what more do we need to do in your perspective? I wish I could answer that question. I think the problem is that we identified a lot of problems with issues with the workforce and how in certain areas it was really diminishing the numbers of people. And that hasn't changed. Again, from my own personal experience, I can speak about the small fields like radiation, biology, radiation, epidemiology, radiochemistry, seems to be staying level. Epidemiology has gone down. Radiation biology has really gone down. I don't know what we can do to counter that. That's been some of the frustrations. Some of the recommendations were trying to get more government engagement and interaction to build a nationwide program to try to facilitate these things. But all of that takes money. And that's part of the challenges with trying to develop some of these problems that some of these fields, these approaches, we need more dollars. Because one of the things that we were hearing from time to time was that people weren't attracted into some of these fields because they just weren't sufficiently high enough pay. And we've talked about that specifically for the states. But I think that's an issue for some of the academic positions and so forth that people get into them because they really care about the field. And they're frustrated because they sometimes don't feel like they are being compensated as well as they would be in other fields. And we also need government support, something to give us more of an umbrella to be able to bring these various groups together to try to work out how to solve some of these problems and figure out how to develop educational, as Tom has been saying, how to develop outreach that brings these young people into the program. I don't think we've made much progress at all, unfortunately, in the last almost 10 years now.  Well, it's a realist and it's a call to action for us as we're as we're seizing these opportunities. We talked, we talked about getting people at the at the early stage, you know, before they have a career. What if people are in an adjacent field? You know, Katie mentioned that she was in nuclear engineering. You know, someone's in kind of a related field and they want to get into this. How can how could they break in? What ideas do you have for, you know, maybe getting a certificate or getting a night school degree or just doing it on the job? How has this worked in the past? I know, Angela, you've talked to me about this in the past, and so you might want to start, but others may want to turn in. Yeah, sure. I mean, I'll share. I started from an ancillary position. I from high school, I knew it. And that's why I use this example. I knew what an x-ray tech did. I knew what an ultrasound tech did. That's what I decided I was going to do. I got into that field and really liked the radiation part of it, but I didn't really know anything more than that. So when I did join the state, I realized there was this position called a health physicist, and that's when I was able to start to explore that avenue. And Oregon State has a distance version of their health physics program, which made it possible for me to continue to work and also explore and get the education in health physics with my master's degree and then also eventually getting certified. So, but I wasn't in a position in my life at that point to want to leave and go to full education, although it was a big lift to do a master's degree and work, and not everybody's willing to take on that level of effort. But having that avenue and that path that didn't make me have to stop my career at the same time I wanted to explore a new pathway was beneficial and has really benefited me to get to where I am here today. And that's what I'd like to foster for others who've gotten into a career path and like it or like an aspect of it that's ancillary to what we do and what we need here in the radiation protection world, health physics specifically too, and help them navigate without having to do major life changes to get to us because if that's the case they won't. And so I think that that is what we'd need to look at for that community. Thanks Andrew. Anyone else want to add in that thought? I'd recommend people pursue getting certified. You know the requirements, the degree requirements for that are pretty liberal and it demonstrates a level of competence, even if you just pass part one. And I think that really makes a big difference. I stay in touch with employers and I can tell you that one of the employers I just talked to said that she had a lot of applications for her job, it was a very desirable job in a desirable location and she only interviewed CHPs. Conversely, I had another one of our alumni who was interviewing people for a health physicist's job. He had over 150 applications. He said all of them except one were nuclear engineers looking to become health physicists. And so if they were certified, certainly he would have considered them differently. But it's a big difference. That's really interesting, Tom. So what are some examples of the related degrees that you could have and still get certified, like nuclear engineering perhaps obviously, maybe biology or something like that? Yeah, if you look at the A-B-H-P website, they've got a list of the people who took the CHP exam this, I believe this past year or at least in the last two years, and the degrees that people have had. And it's a very large variety of degrees. They also denote their success at passing the exam, which isn't always as good. Well, hence the study group, I suppose. I hope they're very successful. I really enjoy seeing people pass the exam. It's a great sense of accomplishment. And I really feel that it's a demonstration of someone's dedication to studying the profession and really learning the nuts and bolts and the theory behind it. It is, I believe, part of an education rather than training. Yeah, and I'll throw a plug in. I know that Tom, your training program for studying for CHP was one of the main things that helped me get through part two. So I think creating more of those things available to people to do on their own time and really take the effort to grow are the types of things that are going to be helpful. So what the NRC is doing internally for NRC, but some of the things that you've done, Tom, I think are the ways that we can reach our community. Thank you. So another, you know, this is an NRC conference. So no promises on anything, but how can the NRC help with these issues? You know, what can we do as one piece of the federal family to help with a lot of the challenge? It's been a lot of challenges raised today. You know, the NRC back in 2000, I think it was 1999. It was 20 years ago. I took a CHP review class at White Flint that was sponsored by the NRC. The local chapter of the Health Physics Society was running a little short course. They met on, I think, Thursday nights. And there's a gentleman, I'm not sure if any of you've heard of him. His name was Charlie Willis. He was running the course and it was quite a good experience. And I think your study program you're already doing internally is a great way to kick things off, get people excited and keep them motivated. It's tough. I think that, you know, at least on the material side of the fence and CRCPD and other radiation protection groups will need to try to fill in the gaps for the non-material stuff. But you guys touch every piece of materials world from reactors to, you know, materials uses in industry and medicine. And I've seen some things actually on your social media where you're highlighting what people are doing in their jobs. Like there's a picture from sitting at their desk. I've seen some of those things come through. So I think that NRC is in a good position to maybe develop some of those characters or things that people can identify to what are people doing in the NRC or even with some of our licensees. We can go and say, what do you do every day? What and make them a person, make them the position, something that's recognizable to the community. And so I think maybe some effort in drafting some of those things that we can then use to go out to the high schools or to the other college departments and try to navigate that. I mean, I think that just takes resources and effort and, you know, development. And I think if the NRC has some resources to put toward that would be helpful. Thanks for those ideas. So perhaps our last question, depending on how many answers you all give, I'll start with Kathy and then everyone else can have an opportunity to double check and I'll check through. We just got another question too. So if on this broadcast someone is a high school student or a college student, I think that's at least a conceivable possibility and wants to learn more, thinks this is interesting but doesn't even know where to go next to find out more information. Where would you recommend those folks start to learn more about this field and how they might grow within it? Kathy, do you have thoughts? Well, my email was on my last slide so they could always email me and I'll do my best to get them to the right person or a person who hopefully can help them that's affiliated with NCRP from some somewhere in their area. I think that all of the professional societies that I'm familiar with in the Radiation Sciences are really trying to do ways of outreaching to younger people and I think that's what we really need to encourage is to get when young people approach us, get them in touch with someone who's really into education in the professional societies. I mean, as I said, within NCRP, I know a number of individuals like Tom, for example, who are really into education and are really eager to reach out to younger people, to high school and early college folks. It's our network. I mean, that's where we're a small enough field that we have, can really take advantage of our network. I can call up, I can email people all over the world to get them to help. It's just a case of trying to use our networks. When we get these, hopefully get younger people to reach out to us, talk to each other and really try to encourage those people. Thanks for that. While Kathy was talking, I realized that the question page updated late with a bunch of questions. I'm going to try to throw in a few more questions so that people don't feel like we're ignoring them. We weren't. Person, easy one for Tom. Do you have a good email address to submit questions about radiation protection jobs in Colorado? Would you be willing to share your email? Yes. My email, I'll put it in, shall I just put it in the chat? No one can see the chat, so say it out loud if you want. It's just tj at colostate.edu. All right. Hopefully that person heard that and is excited. I always tell students there are no radiation jobs in Colorado, typically. We have a couple of questions, and I'll just be curious if anyone reacts kind of from the idea of branding and describing this field in a way that really gets at the diversity of work. People were suggesting what if it were radiological engineering and health? What if it were radiation protection advisor versus health physicist? Does anybody have thoughts on that? Is that just window dressing or is there something to that idea? Well, I think there's a diversity of jobs, right? And I think any of those could probably fit whatever job is happening. So I think it's linking that the health physics degree gets you to those things. So I don't know that we need to change the term health physicist, per se, but we need to help people understand what it means and give them some sort of a picture. And that might be developing some of these different modes of what's an RSO versus an inspection person versus a laboratory analyst, but all of it could fall from health physics. But again, just linking that back, I think. All right. I'm just scrolling through to make sure we don't miss anything else big. If we missed your question, it was only because I was trying to combine it with something else. So we have just a couple of minutes left. I just wanted to leave the opportunity for each of our four panelists. If there's anything that we didn't ask a question about that you want to mention, or something that you want to promote from your own organization, like a job posting like I took the advantage of, I'd be happy for you to take that opportunity. So, Kathy? I don't have anything specific. We're here looking for NCRP, looking for a pipeline, looking for new individuals to bring in our work scope. We started a program for internships or are starting to try to do more mentoring of college kids, graduate students. Any of you, anybody who's got students who might be interested in internships or mentorships through NCRP, please give me a buzz. We'd love to try to work with those. I'm an educator at heart and many at NCRP are and we really are trying to reach out and bring in a lot more new and young people. Thanks, Kathy. Tom, anything you want to add? Just add that if anybody wants to email me with any questions, I'm happy to answer any questions, especially for potential students. They don't have to want to go to Colorado State. They can go anywhere. I just love to see more people get into the profession. We absolutely are hurting for people coming in. Thanks, Tom. Angel? Yeah, I just really appreciate the opportunity to share and to partner with all of you and all of our other partners who aren't on this panel. I think together we're going to be able to try to work our way through this and solve it as much as possible. So my plug will be if there's anybody who would like to work with CRCPD on our efforts to plug the, you know, while we're trying to fill the pipeline, while we're trying to grow our resources, if there's anybody who wants to participate on the work group to help us navigate the interim, we'd love to have you as a member and to help us figure out the best way to do that across our programs so we can maintain our skill sets while we try to build new ones. Thanks, Angela. Katie, final thoughts from you? Yeah, I just want to thank everyone for joining us and having the opportunity. Like many talked about if anybody's interested in joining Health Physics at any level, really reach out to us. Even if you're in Health Physics and you want just more diverse topics, reach out to the network. There's so many questions out there, so much need and you could have as much work as you want and just reach out and meet each other and have and grow your network and join us. Thank you. Yeah, so NRC folks on the line, make sure that you're connecting up with Katie. So if we could put up slide five from my presentation, which has my email and Daniel's email, I'll just leave that up there for a little bit while we're closing out. But finally, I want to thank all of our panelists, Kathy, Tom, Angela, Katie for devoting their time to prepare presentations to get ready for this, to figure out the platform, which is a little different than how a lot of us do meetings. I appreciate the technical support from the conference organizers and certainly to Daniel and Dan, who've been with us every step of the way to make sure that we could pull this off. On the slide that's up there now, you'll see Daniel's email. He was the session coordinator. I'm sure that he'd be open to feedback on how the session went. If there's not an official feedback form, which there probably is. And then my email, Teresa Clark at nrc.gov is there on the slide. Feel free to reach out to me and I can put you in touch with anyone who is on the panel, as well as answer NRC related questions. And don't forget about those jobs I throw up there. USAJobs.gov is your source for any NRC related job opportunities, as well as the rest of the federal government. So with that, we'll close out the session. Thank you so much for listening today and enjoy the rest of the RIC. Take care everyone.


My name is Angela. I'm a software engineer at Pivotal. And today, we'll be getting into the nitty-gritty details of CF plus CNI, particularly how to integrate your own networking solution. So first, we'll just level set on what CNI is, why we even care about having this plugability in this extension point in Cloud Foundry, before looking at what the CNI experience is today in CF, before finally spending the majority of our time talking about tips and tricks for actually integrating your own solution. So first, what exactly is CNI? CNI is the container network interface. And it's an industry standard API for container runtimes to call out to third-party network plugins. So it's part of the Cloud Foundry, or Cloud Native Computing Foundation. And so what this really allows is for some container runtime systems, so for example, in Cloud Foundry, Diego, or perhaps Kubernetes, to be able to call out to different networking solutions to get different networking features for their containers. In particular, as its industry standard API, we're going to be focusing in not so much on the container runtimes calling out, but instead on the networking plugins themselves. So as part of CNI, we have these core CNI plugins that will actually set up the networking experience for your containers. What they're tasked with is first, of course, creating the network interface for your containers. As you can imagine, when you have a create, you also have a delete. And so core CNI plugins also care about removing resources when your containers are deleted, so cleaning up after themselves. And your deletion should always be idempotent, right? It should never be erring out. Hopefully everything's deleted the first time, but if not, run it again and see us succeed. And very recently, there's been a third addition to the specification for CNI plugins, which is a check, to ensure that after you've created your container that your networking is set up as expected. So as we can see, by looking at all these three main parts of the specification, we're really focused with our CNI plugins on our core feature of network connectivity. So now that we see what a CNI plugin should be doing, you might be wondering how does it actually implement these features? How does it actually work? Well, your CNI plugin that your container runtime system will call out to, it takes a form of a binary, and it's invoked during your container creation or deletion by your container runtime system. And the arguments for how you actually want it to be set up are passed in through a combination of environment variables and standard in. So pretty straightforward. It's all listed in the specification of the container networking GitHub. You can look there for more details. In addition to your core CNI plugins that are really focused on your network connectivity aspect, there's also a notion of chain plugins. So after you set up your core network functionality, you may want some additional features, such as bandwidth shaping or port mapping. And so what you can do is actually provide in addition to your core CNI plugin, plugins to be run after that will add these additional features. So you sort of get the abstraction you can pick and choose. You don't have to just take your core CNI plugin and have it the end all be all. So now that we see sort of the basics of CNI, you might be wondering, OK, well, that's great. Obviously, CNI is allowing me a specification. It's allowing me an abstraction. But why do I care about this API layer? Why would I even want to switch out one CNI solution for another? Well, first and foremost, you might actually care about the type of networking implementation for your containers. There's a host of different ways that you can implement a container network. You could have a flat network. You could have an overlay. Maybe you're using IP tables. Maybe you're using a bridge. The list goes on and on. And maybe you care for one reason or another about the specific implementation. And that's why you would want to choose a different CNI plugin. The second reason, and usually one that people find more compelling, is that there is an entire ecosystem around connectivity as well. While the core CNI plugin is really focused on connectivity, it doesn't end there. You might care about things like policy. So after I've created my container, what can I actually talk to out on the internet? What can talk to it? In addition, you might care about something like network isolation. Is the containers I'm creating isolated perhaps from other containers? Or the last thing you might care about is something like ensuring that in addition to your container having an identity within your container runtime system and having an identity outside of it as well. So that, for example, you have a legacy database and you want to whitelist only specific IP. You want to make sure that you have that container actually mapping to that external IP identity. And so as we can see, a lot of people find this compelling. And so we have a whole bevy of CNI plugins that you can choose from that present different solutions for different use cases. And this list can be overwhelming, but we're going to focus in now on moving from CNI in general to CNI in Cloud Foundry. How does it work today? Well, currently, if we go back to the list and focus in, we see noted here that we have Silk, a CNI plugin designed for Cloud Foundry. And so let's examine exactly how CNI works in Cloud Foundry through the examination of a simple CF push. What happens when a container is created? This diagram is going to be obviously highly simplified, but during a CF push, eventually the information will be passed down to Diego, which is our container runtime system. From here, Diego will decide what host the container should be run on, and that information will eventually make its way down to Garden, which is actually going to issue the container create. As part of Garden, we do have a Garden external networker, which we'll take care of setting up the network connectivity aspects. But first, Garden will say, OK, I see that you've pushed an app. There is a new process. Needs a new container. And we'll start the container create process. Before finishing the container create, though, we need to have network connectivity. And that's what, via the Garden external networker, we'll be calling out over the CNI API to the Silk CNI plugin. Now, the Silk CNI plugin doesn't live on its own. It, in turn, calls out to a Silk daemon that we have running on the host VM, which eventually we'll call out and ensure that the state of the world is consistent with an external controller running on a different virtual machine. And once all of this information is passed through, the Silk CNI plugin knows the state of the world, it eventually will be able to set up the networking stack, allocate an IP for the container, and then Garden can finish the container creation process. So as you can see here, the main focus is that we have all of these red components that are part of our CNI extension, things that are Silk specific and swappable. But we're still abiding by the CNI API. So we have this green section here. We have the Garden external networker that's really calling out to a CNI plugin and, presumably, could be calling out instead of to Silk to any other CNI plugin. And so this gets to the tips and tricks for actually integrating, right? How do I swap my own CNI plugin solution for Silk? How do I change those red components? Well, we'll talk about two main things in terms of tips and tricks for integrating. First, some specifics on the creation of your Bosch release for your CNI plugin. And then secondly, your CNI plugin development itself. What preconceived notions in Cloud Foundry? Does your plugin have to respect? So first, creating a Bosch release. Obviously, you're going to be packaging some things up, first and foremost, your CNI plugin. But also, in addition, you may have a daemon, a long running process running that should be packaged as a Bosch job as well. Of course, not every single CNI plugin needs a daemon, but you'll find the vast majority too. Additionally, if you have any controllers or any other things as part of your CNI ecosystem, you should also be packaging those up as well in this release. So for this release, we recommend that you name it CNI. And the reason we recommend that you name it CNI is because the Guardian external networker needs to know how exactly to call out to this specific CNI plugin. Right now in CF deployment, you'll see if you look at the properties for the Guardian external networker, it's configured to look for your plugin in the packages CNI bin directory and look for the config for that binary in the job CNI config directory. And so if you name your release CNI, you don't have to deal with any ops files, any changes to the core CF deployment. You simply need to create that Bosch release and pass that in instead of silk. And of course, always follow best practices. This presentation will be made available. You can follow the link to get more tips and tricks with just general Bosch goodness. In addition to actually creating the release or perhaps before creating the release, you wanna make sure your plugin actually works, right? And so how do you wanna do your CNI plugin development? Maybe you wanna create a plugin from scratch for one reason or another, or maybe you wanna take a plugin on that long list and modify it so that it works for the Cloud Foundry use case. So if you're starting a CNI plugin from scratch, the first thing you'll wanna do of course is set up network connectivity between containers, make sure it does what the CNI spec tells a CNI plugin must do. If not, if you're taking something like Flannel or Calico or another solution, you can probably skip this step because they've already implemented the network connectivity feature. And instead you'll be focusing on the second part, which is respecting Cloud Foundry's network functionality. What do I mean by that? Well, specifically what I mean is that you need to respect application security groups or ASGs in Cloud Foundry. And you also need to respect C2C container to container policy and dynamic egress policy. So these are network policy features that are promised by Cloud Foundry that you can be writing. And so any CNI plugin that you swap in needs to make sure to read these policies and enforce them as well. So you're having a consistent Cloud Foundry experience. So let's look first at application security groups or ASGs. So ASGs define egress policy. So policy from your application to the external web. Can I talk to, let's say Google.com for example. ASGs can either be global, so apply to any container in a Cloud Foundry deployment or it could also be on a per space basis. And ASGs also apply either to staging containers or running containers. So we see that there's a few permutations of all of these combined. ASGs are stored in the Cloud Controller database. And so you can make a simple call to the Cloud API or CAPI to get the list of ASGs that you need to be enforcing. This would be a get to the V2 security groups endpoint. Obviously this is a lot of text, it's really small. We're gonna focus in on what each specific ASG looks like in the response body. Focusing in, we see that we have in this example a name which is a default security group. And then in this entity, we have the rules. So what ASGs are actually being defined here. In this case, we have a pretty permissive set of ASGs. It can basically talk to anything in the whole wide world over all protocols. But you can definitely make it more fine-grained. And you can have as many rules in your ASGs as you want. Next, we see after the rules, we have two things called running default and staging defaults. And what default means in this case is global. So is this a global ASG for my running containers or for my staging containers? If either of these are false, then you can find what spaces they apply to by looking at the spaces and staging spaces URL. Which you'll just follow that link and we'll give back the list of what spaces relate to this security group. And so that way you get all the information from that space. You can then apply to specific containers depending on what space that container is running. But you might be wondering, or you might be thinking to yourself, well, do I really wanna be querying cappy all the time? Do I wanna be pounding it? Do I wanna be giving it this heavy load? Can I even query and pull it as often as I would need to? And so there is a second option for figuring out what ASGs are currently created, which ones are currently applied into what containers. And that's through either, and that's through querying Diego. So Diego's BBS backing data store stores information about all desired long running processes, desired LRPs. And as part of that information on a desired LRP, we get the list of ASGs. So you can either be watching the BBS or you can make a post to the V1 actual LRPs lists to get back all the containers that are currently created. And as part of each LRP, there's a section called egress rules, which has the list of all of the ASGs that are being applied on a per container basis. So you can do a mix of querying for all of them to make sure you don't miss anything in addition to watching the BBS to ensure that as containers are being created, you're applying the right application security groups to those containers. After ASGs are supported or respected, the second thing you'll need to respect are container-to-container network policies and dynamic egress policies. And both of these live in the same policy server, C2C, container-to-container policies, deal with whitelisting traffic between containers. So by default, all traffic between two containers in a cloud boundary installation is rejected. But you can have a C2C policy to allow traffic from one container to a different container. Additionally, dynamic egress is the new version of ASGs. The main difference is that with ASGs, you would have to restart a container to have it apply. With dynamic egress, you can simply make the policy and it will be applied to those containers, to those spaces. And so both of these can be queried from the policy server API via a GET to the networking V1 internal policies. Since you're going to be respecting this probably as part of a job or process that you're deploying, you'll want to use the internal endpoint here. And we'll focus in first on a C2C policy. So we see here that we have a source and destination for your C2C policy. The source and destination IDs are actually the application GUIDs. And that's of course because containers can come and go, your IPs are ephemeral, your app GUID is the way to actually track what container you care about and then you can from there correlate from the app GUID, the IP that it's currently running on. And we see here that on the destination, you have a list of ports that the source can talk to for that destination and over what protocol. Similarly, for dynamic egress policies, we see that the source is also an ID, which is an application GUID. But the destination in this case, because we're talking to the outside internet, will be a list of IPs, which have a start and an end, and a list of ports. So in summary, we see that integrating CNI plugins into Cloud Foundry is totally feasible. You can take a CNI plugin that already exists, make some modifications to respect Cloud Foundry concepts and package it up as a bot release. And you should go out and try it for yourself and give us feedback on what works or doesn't. As you go on this journey, if you want any help or assistance, you can always reach the container networking team on Slack. And there's also a couple of links to first, the container, the CNI communities, GitHub org, as well as Silk Release, if you want an example starting point of what a CNI Bosch releases, which will also direct you to the Silk CNI plugin itself. And with that, thank you all for attending and I'm open to questions. One question about security groups. So before you enable CF Networking, security groups are, they still work, even without CNI and all of this. They work without CF Networking. When we enable CF Networking, in this case, the original one doesn't apply anymore? They still apply. Yes, so the question, yeah. So the way it works is application security groups, you're right, existed before container networking. When container networking was implemented, when we switched over to abiding by the CNI specification, we still ensured that we respected application security groups. But who applies them in this case? CNI, this our CNI plugin or something else which? Yes, so right now, if we actually go back to, this doesn't love me. Okay, where am I? If we go back to the drawing, it's so far back. Here, yeah, so if we actually, Silk CNI plugin is actually sort of many layers of wrapping, there's a CF wrapper CNI plugin which ultimately calls out to the Silk CNI plugin and that's what currently is responsible for applying ASGs. So if you were to bring in your own networking solution, then yes, you need to be respecting ASGs because Silk CNI plugin is what's respecting the ASGs right now. So the answer is that the plugin actually does this work. So it's replacing the original implementation. Yes, so the plugin will do the work, but in addition, because of dynamic egress policies as well, you'll probably need some long running process watching for these changes, right? And actually implementing the changing ASGs, if that makes sense. Okay, thank you. Chris? He has notes to ask a question. Three questions, but first out one, do you support chaining plugins with Garden or will only call one plugin? Yeah, so right now, the Garden external networker is only set up to call one plugin by no chain plugins is on the radar of the container networking team and they have office hours right after this. You should talk to them if it's a use case that you're really interested in having supported sooner rather than later. And then you mentioned that for the CFASGs, it could be in running and staging, but I didn't understand what staging meant. Yeah, so when you push an app, or when you push an app, you'll first have a staging container created that will be dealing with everything to get your actual running ASG set up. The running ASG will be your actual long lived container. Your staging will be your setup shorter. And then last one was, when you apply a dynamic ASG egress policy, will it cut existing connections if they are currently in flight? So say I'm pooling something from an external source and then all of a sudden I decide nobody should be allowed that. Will it immediately cut it off or allow those questions to finish? So in general, ASGs are whitelist, so you would be removing one, I guess, to cut off a connection. ASGs and dynamic egress will also compound on each other. If you delete an ASG and you have a connection going, I believe your connection will finish before, and then before the ASG actually takes place and is removed and you're no longer allowed to talk to that connection. Great, thanks. Yep, no problem. One last question. Oh, we have two, all right. Well, let's... Hello. Yeah, yeah. Hi, third question. Is it possible to pass CNI specific metadata somehow to the CNI plugin? Is it possible to pass CNI specific metadata? Yes. What do you mean exactly? That I have a CNI plugin and I would like to get some information from my app when I do a safe push to use some kind of specific logic that would be possible to actually... It's like the capabilities, for example, for the port mapping. I would have to think on that because right now, really, on the CNI plugin level, you're really constricted by the information being passed down as part of a CF push, so the information on your desired LRP. There's not really a append metadata field there, but I could envision maybe if you had some other process as part of your CNI plugin that you would have those port mappings or have that information to, then perhaps your CNI plugin could call out to that. Okay, excellent. Maybe that would just be my first thought off the top of my head. Thanks. I'm not sure if this is a good question for this session. It's about if networking in general. It's been there for a while already, but still there is no way to define networking rules as like make them important. You need to run a call to add the rule, and especially this becomes a problem when you need to do a blue-green, or even like to put your rules together with your code somewhere to, like you need to script it basically every time. And it causes some, so any plans to fix that? Yeah, yeah, yeah, any plans. Yeah, I know it's definitely, this has come up multiple times. Like, you know, for example, could we define policies like the app manifest or some other level, so it's not just a call via the CLI or API. I would suggest going to the networking office hours right after this, and again, you know, raising your hand. I'm not sure currently where it's falls on the priority list, but you know it is a very common request.  Thank you very much. Okay, let's thank Enjirai again. Thank you. Thank you.