In Their Own Words With Rad Con Manager Vashek Vylet

After my graduation, I briefly worked in a uranium mine as a health physicist. It was a grim and very politicized environment, with armed guards everywhere. The call for one-year of mandatory military service came to me as a relief.

After military service, I was fortunate that a position opened up at my alma mater as a teaching assistant/lecturer and I stayed there while I enrolled in the Ph.D. program. Just about the time I was ready to begin my thesis, I was told I would need the authorization of the Communist Party in order to proceed. I was told that I must prove my allegiance and become a member.

That was the turning point for me: It was time to leave the country. My two brothers and I were able to get visas as tourists to go to Yugoslavia. From there, in the dark of the night we swam across a bay to Italy, where a friend was waiting for us with dry clothes and papers that would get us to Switzerland.

There, I secured a position as a research fellow at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, where I was able to pursue my Ph.D. work. My task was to develop a system to measure neutron spectra in Swiss nuclear power plants. I applied for political asylum there, but the Swiss were hesitant. Several years later, my brother and I applied to the United States and we were accepted.

That all happened just as I was about to finish my thesis; I got word that I would leave in a month. I had very little sleep during that time; it was crazy, but I managed to finish.

After I arrived in the U.S., I was lucky enough to find a postdoc position in the Physics Department at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., where I stayed for two years working in the cosmic ray group. A position with Fermilab’s radiation protection and health physics program came available and that’s where I started my work around accelerators. From there, I went to SLAC, where I worked in the radiation group for seven years. I gained a lot of knowledge there.

By the end of the 1990s, I’d gotten married (my wife, Xuan, is also in health physics) but I’d made the mistake of not buying a home in California when prices were affordable. We knew we wanted to have a family, and that we’d have to move in order to afford a home of our own.

I was hired as the associate director of the Radiation Safety Division at Duke University and Duke Medical Center. I also taught in the Physics Department and in the Graduate Program in Medical Physics. Our son, Kai, was born while we were there.

When we were in California, I got into sailing and had a 27-foot boat. I missed sailing, and there wasn’t any water near Durham. When I heard about the opening at Jefferson Lab, I saw it as an opportunity to do interesting work on very complex projects and also to be closer to the coast, so I could return to sailing.

When we moved here, one of our biggest considerations was to find good schools for Kai, so we chose York County. Xuan is working in medical dosimetry at Chesapeake Regional Medical Center (formerly called Chesapeake General Hospital).

One of my greatest challenges as a father is to come up with a story line for the nightly tale I tell Kai. The continuing cast includes "Scrat" and "Squirrel" and that’s what I contemplate on my way home each evening. He’s a tough critic!

In addition to my work here, I am co-director of the School of Radiation Protection & Damage at the Ettore Majorana Center in Erice, Sicily, and associate editor of the Health Physics journal, both of which keep me in touch with scientists around the world.

as told to Judi Tull