In Mangalore University’s second attempt to create two new postgraduate departments to teach Geography and Medical Physics, by carving them out from their parental Departments of Marine Geology and Physics, respectively, its academic council in its meeting on Thursday approved two separate revised statutes to establish the departments.
The university introduced the postgraduate programme in Geography at its campus from 2016-17 while the Medical Physics programme commenced from 2018-19. The council passed the revised statutes governing the establishment of postgraduate department of studies and research in Geography and in Medical Physics.
Though the university earlier had prepared the draft statutes for the establishment of the same two departments and had sent them for the approval of the government the latter had not approved them stating that the government can not approve creation of new posts in view of financial constraints.
Hence, the university revised the draft statutes by redeploying the existing posts of teachers and the same was tabled before the council for approval on Thursday.
The revised draft statues said that each of the two new departments will have one Professor, an Associate Professor, and an Assistant Professor. Their posts will be made available by redeployment of similar posts already existing in the postgraduate departments of the university. A programme in Medical Physics is relatively a new one introduced by the university. Medical Physics is the application of Physics to the needs of medicine. Its draft said that this discipline of Physics is responsible for the technical foundations of Radiology, Radiation Oncology, and Nuclear Medicine. There is an acute shortage of trained and qualified medical physicists in the country.
A medical physicist is often called as radiation physicist who played a prominent role in team work in terms of ensuring complete quality assurance of radiation generating equipment, enabling accurate treatment planning and guiding radiation oncologists in precise treatment delivery, pre and post-treatment quality checks on treatment plans, the draft added.
