Jen Badie
Some of the objects on the desk of the University of Maryland School of Graduate Studies Dean Kenneth H. Wong, PhD, are reminders of stops along the way in his career — in one case going back to when he was fresh out of high school: a set of propellers for measuring water velocity, typically used in a stream or river.
“My first real science job in the summer after I finished high school was with the U.S. Geological Survey, building and testing hydrologic instrumentation with components like these,” Wong said. “These instruments were hooked up to large, slow [by modern standards] dataloggers and computers from Radio Shack.”
Wong, who also is vice provost for graduate education, University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB), arrived on campus in summer 2023. He previously was the senior associate dean of the Graduate School for the National Capital Region and director of the Northern Virginia Center at Virginia Tech. As a research professor, he has studied medical imaging, radiation therapy, image-guided interventions, and applications of machine learning in these fields.
Also on Wong’s desk is a scale model of the CyberKnife, a robotic system for precision radiosurgery that reminds him of his postdoctoral training in the radiology department at Georgetown University.
“Some of my early work as a medical physics postdoc involved studying the capabilities of the CyberKnife for treating solid tumors in organs that move with respiration, such as the lung and liver,” he said, adding that he received this model as an award given to research teams presenting at a CyberKnife User Group annual meeting.
Wong also has a collection of 3-D printed objects that he has made based on the designs of others. These include an orange tablet or phone stand, shaped similarly to the sinc(x) function from signal processing; a green open box shaped like a Minecraft ore block; and a white fidget cube designed to be opened and folded to create new shapes.
“I enjoy 3-D printing as a combination of technology and artistic creativity, plus you can create things that would be difficult to make with conventional manufacturing,” Wong said.
