 The role that HP professionals play in society is that they help ensure that wherever radioactive material is used, it is used safely and responsibly. The role of the Radiation Protection Professional in our society is an important one because what it does is it allows for the use of these beneficial technologies, either through medicine or research or industrial uses or energy production. It allows for those uses while protecting against the potential harmful effects of radiation exposure. Well I like to think that nuclear regulation wouldn't be necessary if not for radiation. So radiation protection really is the backbone to our agency. All the regulations in the end are about controlling radiation and the radioactive material associated with it. My main responsibilities for day to day are basically in the area of licensing. We receive license amendments from nuclear power licensees that want to make changes to their facilities and we receive those license amendment requests and my job is to review those against the regulations to make sure that they continue to meet those regulations. In the assignment headquarters, generally the regions have their own expertise out there. They can generally do all these inspections on their own. They generally will call me and say, well we have an inspection where there will be probably lots of questions or will any particular expertise in an area that you are well versed in? Sometimes we do have controversial issues that we face, particularly in the medical arena that call for us to have important briefings with the commission and testimony before Congress. Health physicists really perform one of the main functions of the NRC. Our main mission is to protect the health and safety of the public and what they're protecting them from is radiation and that's what health physicists do. I feel like the field of health physics contributes to the mission of the agency in so many aspects. Almost every application or renewal or amendment that comes into this agency for consideration, someone is looking at it to see what are the health physics implications and what kind of evaluation needs to be performed.