James Bowsher was a faculty member of Duke University School of Medicine and Duke Kunshan University for over 30 years.  Originally from Augusta, GA, he received his B.S. in Physics in 1980 from Davidson College and completed a PhD in Physics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1989.  He transitioned the majority of his faculty effort from Duke University to Duke Kunshan University in 2015, where he was Associate Professor of Medical Physics at the time of his death.

Jim started at Duke in 1989 as a research associate in the Department of Radiology.  He was affiliated with the laboratories of Carey Floyd, PhD and Ronald Jaszczak, PhD, which were two of the pre-eminent laboratories in th。/e world in the area of nuclear medicine.  Jim’s expertise was in reconstruction algorithms that were used to generate nuclear medicine images, which became an important contributor to the advent of molecular medicine.  Jim became Assistant Research Professor in 1993 and briefly joined the Center for In Vivo Microcopy, under the direction of G. Allan Johnson, PhD, in 2004-05.

After several years as a faculty member in radiology, Jim transitioned to a faculty appointment in the Department of Radiation Oncology, where he continued his work in the mathematics and science of nuclear medicine reconstruction.  He worked with Fang-Fang Yin, PhD, director of radiation oncology physics, to design a robotic nuclear medicine system that could be used to target radiation therapy treatments based on functional information about the location and size of an active tumor.  He was co-PI on a grant from the National Cancer Institute to develop this robotic SPECT system for radiation oncology, which is a great example of cross-disciplinary work in medical physics that have mentioned numerous times in lectures on cutting edge work in medical physics.

Jim was an active member of the faculty of our Medical Physics Graduate Program at Duke, which launched in 2005 and is now one of the top three graduate programs in the U.S. in our field.

When Duke started a new Medical Physics Graduate Program at DKU in 2014, under the directorship of Fang-Fang Yin, we needed someone to serve as director of graduate studies.  Jim volunteered for that role, and has served expertly as one of the chief leaders of our program in Kunshan, along with David Huang, PhD and Fang-Fang Yin.  Jim taught many of the classes to our DKU medical physics students and was a wise, thoughtful, and caring mentor.  He served as research advisor for 3 PhD students and 11 Masters students in the medical physics graduate programs at Duke and DKU, and on 61 thesis/dissertation committees.

Jim was recognized for his scientific work by a 100 Talents award from Jiangsu Province in 2015 and served on numerous faculty committees at both Duke and DKU.  He taught many of the courses in the DKU graduate program and was greatly appreciated by our students.  He won the Excellence in Teaching Award at DKU five times from 2016-2021.  Jim would return each summer to Durham to attend to the DKU medical physics graduate students who came for a semester at Duke in their second year.

Jim was an essential leader of graduate programs at Duke and DKU and will be deeply missed.  Jim had a humble, quiet, and gentle manner, and was tremendously effective in his leadership of our program at DKU.

Unfortunately, Jim passed away on Dec. 3. 2022, but he needs to be remembered for all the DKU and Duke Medical Physics program students.