Given the discrepancy between men and women’s equal rates of medical school matriculation and their rates of academic promotion and leadership role acquisition, the need to provide mentorship and education to women in academic medicine is becoming increasingly recognized. Numerous large-scale programs have been developed to provide support and resources for women’s enrichment and retention in academic medicine. Analyses of contributory factors to the aforementioned discrepancy commonly cite insufficient mentoring and role modeling as well as challenges with organizational navigation. Since residency training has been shown to be a critical juncture for making the decision to pursue an academic career, there is a need for innovative and tailored educational and mentorship programs targeting residents. Acknowledging residents’ competing demands, we designed a program to provide easily accessible mentorship and contact with role models for our trainees at the departmental and institutional levels. We believe that this is an important step towards encouraging women’s pursuit of academic careers. Our model may be useful to other emergency medicine residencies looking to provide such opportunities for their women residents.

Few residency curricular interventions have focused on improving well-being and promoting humanism. We describe the implementation of a novel curriculum based on small-group reflection rounds—the Emergency Medicine Reflection Rounds (EMRR)—at a 4-year US emergency medicine (EM) residency. During the inaugural year (2010–2011), nine residents volunteered to take part in 1-hour monthly sessions with faculty facilitators. Residents were provided with a confidential environment to discuss difficult ethical and interpersonal encounters from their clinical experiences. Ongoing feedback from participants was solicited, culminating with a four-question survey in which all respondents remarked that the EMRR contributed to improving their own well-being and agreed that it provided an important forum for residents to discuss difficult issues in a safe environment. In this article, we describe our innovation as an example of a wellness initiative that has promoted reflective practice and fostered cooperative learning around the communication, professional, and ethical challenges inherent in EM practice. Our EMRR model may be useful to other EM residences looking to supplement their wellness curriculum.

This is a summary of the presentations and discussion of Panel 2.15, Civil-Military Cooperation in Humanitarian Health Action of the Conference, Health Aspects of the Tsunami Disaster in Asia, convened by the World Health Organization (WHO) in Phuket, Thailand, 04–06 May 2005. The topics discussed included issues related to civil-military collaboration in humanitarian health actions as pertain to the responses to the damage created by the Tsunami. It is presented in the following sections: (1) how effective civil-military cooperation can help health responses, including; (a) needs assessment; (b) coordination; (c) filling gaps; and (d) capacity (2) what was done well, and what could have been done better better; and (3) conclusions and recommendations. Conclusions and recommendations included: (1) the best coordination mechanisms for civil-military cooperation; and (2) suggested additions and improvements.

We have continued to investigate ion-beam mixing in bilay-er targets irradiated by 2-MeV He+ microbeams at room temperature. Although we have previously reported a linear dependence of interface width on dose for Cu/Al targets 1, more extensive results have not supported this conclusion, within statistical uncertainty, it appears that the interface width in Cu/Al (1) is proportional to the square root of dose, at constant dose rate, (2) is larger in Al than in Cu, for the same dose, (3) is proportional to the 1/4 power of dose rate, and (4) is absent at liquid nitrogen temperature. Calculations of the expected interface growth rate from a radiation-enhanced diffusion model have provided order-of-magnitude agreement with observed rates. Additionally, intermixing of Cu and Al outside the damaged area may indicate significant transverse diffusion of vacancies.

A model for the kinetic growth of oxygen-related thermal donors in Czochralski silicon at about 450°C is presented. The model, which is based on the work of Suezawa and Sumino, derives forward reaction rates for the electrically active species by comparing analytic expressions for the early-time annealing kinetics with the infrared electronic absorption data. The analytic expressions, which are independent of the chemical structure of each species, result from three assumptions: (1) the donor defects beyond the first donor species (TD-1) are chemically stable at the donor formation temperature, (2) the reactions for the TD-1 and those electrically inactive clusters smaller than TD-1 are in equilibrium, and (3) the oxygen interstitial concentration remains constant for short annealing times. The parametrized values of the rate constants indicate that the forward rates of reaction vary widely between species, with a sharp peak at the reaction which takes the first electrically active species to the second. If the rate constants are taken to be of the form K = 4πRD, where R is the capture radius for the given forward reaction and D represents the effective diffusion coefficient, then the variation between reaction constants may be associated with differences in capture radii between species, with the diffusion coefficient assumed to be the value determined by Stavola et al. [Appl. Phys. Lett. 42, 73 (1983)] for “as-provided” material, which has an activation energy of 1.95 eV. The model is successfully applied to the two available sets of infrared absorption data (the Oeder-Wagner and Suezawa-Sumino data) when differences in the annealing temperatures and initial oxygen concentrations are taken into account. The best-fit parameters found by fitting the analytic expressions are then applied to a set of chemical reaction equations which characterize the formation rates of specific oxygen aggregates. The use of such a set of coupled, nonlinear differential equations, which must be solved numerically, introduces free parameters for the oxygen clusters smaller than the first thermal donor. It is shown that the assignments of a thermal donor core containing two, three, four, or five oxygen atoms are all capable of fitting the experimental data. This result indicates that a best fit to the kinetic data cannot be used to argue for a specific thermal donor core. Finally, the authors discuss possible mechanisms for the enhanced values of the capture radii.

The kinetics of thermal donor formation in Czochralski-silicon at ca. 450° C are explained by a simple model based on the work of Suezawa and Sumino which derives forward and reverse reaction rates for each electrically active species from the general features of the infrared electronic absorption spectra. The model, which is independent of the chemical nature of the thermal donor core, assumes that all thermal donors beyond the first donor species are chemically stable at the donor formation temperature, and approximates the reactions for species smaller than the first thermal donor as being in chemical equilibrium. The model is shown to be consistent with both sets of the available IR spectra of thermal donors (Oeder-Wagner and Suezawa-Sumino) when differences in the annealing temperature and initial oxygen concentration are taken into account.