Thomas Kroc, United States

Thomas K. Kroc, Ph.D., is an Applications Physicist III at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab).

Dr. Kroc chaired a committee for the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine on Radioactive Sources: Applications and Alternative Technologies. He has organized three workshops on medical device sterilization to promote the use of electron beams and x-rays in 2019, 2020, and 2021. At Fermilab, he is leading the development of high-power, superconducting accelerators to be used as X-ray sources for medical device sterilization.

He presented on electron beam and x-ray medical device sterilization to the Food and Drug Administration General Hospital and Personal Use Devices Panel of the Medical Devices Advisory Committee Meeting in November 2019. He was a member of the Non-Isotopic Alternative Technologies Working Group that released the Non-isotopic Alternative Technologies White Paper in 2019. He was the lead author of the white paper Accelerator-Driven Medical Sterilization to Replace Co-60 Sources written for the National Nuclear Security Administration in 2017.

He was a member of the organizing committee of a joint Department of Energy/National Cancer Institute Workshop on Ion Beam Therapy in January 2013. For 20 years he worked with the Neutron Therapy Facility at Fermilab, which provided external beam radiation therapy for cancer using fast neutrons. He assumed leadership of this program from 2008 until its closure in 2013.

His interests include development of accelerator technologies, applications of accelerators and accelerator technologies, medical device sterilization, radiation–matter interactions, and medical physics.

Dr. Kroc holds a Ph.D. in physics (1989) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He earned his undergraduate degree in engineering physics (1981) from The Ohio State University.