2021 CRPA Award Winners

Meritorious Service Awards

The Meritorious Service Award recognizes significant services provided to the Canadian Radiation Protection Association (CRPA) or to the radiation protection community in general. This year there were two recipients: Carole Savoie and Jeff Fleming.

Carole Savoie

As a bilingual association, CRPA places high importance on providing information to its members in both English and French. This is enshrined in the CRPA Language Policy, which states that members should be able to obtain services and information from the association in the official language of their choice. This would not be possible without the extremely hard work of the chair of the Translation Committee, Carole Savoie.

Carole has been a CRPA member since 2008 and has chaired the Translation Committee since April 2016. This committee is responsible for translating a host of information and documents:

• Email messages to members
• Bulletin articles
• Conference abstracts
• Website content
• Committee reports
• Board policies and procedures

If you look at any of the Translation Committee reports over the last several years, you will see that this adds up to hundreds of pages of text.

With all that work to do, the resources of the Translation Committee are spread very thin, but you wouldn’t know that from their results. Carole is always quick to respond to every request and manages to provide translations in a very timely manner. Even when she’s taking holidays from her day job, she will often still be available for CRPA work—and if she’s not available, she is sure to let us all know well in advance.

Without Carole, CRPA would struggle to fulfill the requirements of the language policy. She is extremely dedicated to the association and is one of our hardest-working volunteers. She is undoubtedly deserving of the Meritorious Service Award.

Jeff Fleming

The COVID-19 pandemic presented many challenges, but also some great opportunities. When our conference was cancelled in 2020, the Professional Development (PD) Committee got to work transitioning our PD programs online. Jeff Fleming played a key role in helping CRPA choose a learning management system for virtual delivery of our PD sessions. He put many hours of work into researching and setting up a user-friendly online learning platform for CRPA.

The Thinkific platform was selected for CRPA’s official e-learning site in November 2020. Jeff continues to manage and administer the site, and he ensures it is user-friendly and effective. For example, he helped the secretariat set up registration payment options for the courses and discount codes within the platform, and he made sure PD survey forms and training certificates were made available automatically.

Jeff was also instrumental in creating the PD survey that was distributed to members in early 2020. The survey informed the direction the PD Committee should take when developing and finalizing the new CRPA PD program.

Jeff has held a CRPA(R) since 2015 and joined the PD Committee in 2019. He has worked in the radiation protection field for several years, first as a corporate radiation safety officer and a safety e-learning developer with Golder Associates, then as a Class II radiation safety officer with Isologic Innovative Radiopharmaceuticals, and he recently joined the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission as an inspector in the Operations Inspection Division.

There is no doubt that Jeff deserves to receive the Meritorious Service Award.