Mark Ford, a systems and development engineer at Southern Scientific, a medical imaging and nuclear instrumentation company, has won a competition to name a secondary standard radionuclide calibrator
Mark Ford named the new instrument, designed and developed jointly by Southern Scientific and the National Physical Laboratory, 'Fidelis', a Latin term meaning 'faithful'.
This was judged to be particularly apt, as the instrument represents the next generation of measuring instrument in terms of accuracy and traceability.
Fidelis is a new calibrator that is designed for the user who requires the ultimate in precision and is fitted with a new chamber developed at the National Physical Laboratory that is used in conjunction with Southern Scientific's new state-of - the-art, high resolution Pam electrometer module.
Each chamber is a fully certified secondary standard device traceable to the UK National Standard and is recommended for calibration checking and approval of radio pharmacy assay calibrators and calibration check sources.
In his spare time Ford is a keen amateur astronomer and science author.
He is chairman of the South Downs Astronomical Society and collects meteorites, and in 2005 he founded the British and Irish Meteorite Society.
