Something significant: Josh Hayes, Ph.D., discusses his career path and the intricacies of health physics

Josh Hayes, Ph.D., doesn’t do anything by halves.

Hayes, who is the associate manager for health physics at the Radiation Emergency Assistance Center/Training Site (REAC/TS), said that he’s always had an “extreme personality” during a recent interview for the ORISE Featurecast.

As a Marine, a Ph.D. in health physics, and an ultra-marathoner, it’s easy to see that Hayes embodies that lifestyle.

REAC/TS is a deployable asset managed for the U.S. Department of Energy by ORISE.

“When it comes to any sort of nuclear emergency response, REAC/TS is the medical component of that emergency response,” Hayes explained. “Our hallmark is that we have a unique conglomeration of physics with medical response. Every deployable team is made up of health physicists, nurses and physicians. We have a number of physicians that have a unique overlap of abilities, between radiation emergency medicine and occupational medicine.”

In addition to training healthcare professionals, REAC/TS is also available 24/7 by phone, and will deploy worldwide in the event of a radiation emergency.

Hayes has been involved with REAC/TS since 2017, and he has his own childhood to thank for setting him on the path that led him there. His father was a sailor in the U.S. Navy, and the family spent two years living in Japan while he was stationed on the coast of the country. When Hayes enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps, he was also stationed in Japan, living in Okinawa for two years. His second time living in Japan overlapped with the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

“That kind of sparked an interest in me, being that close to Fukushima,” said Hayes. “And I was actually a CBRN Marine—CBRN is an acronym that stands for Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Defense Specialists. So I was already working with unconventional things. I had some basic knowledge of radiological sciences, working as a radiation technician, maintaining RADIAC equipment for the artillery unit.”

The Fukushima disaster was triggered by an earthquake and tsunami, resulting in additional damage from those natural disasters as well.

“I was low enough on the totem pole that that I didn't really get the opportunity to go up and do much more than dealing with the physical aspects of the tsunami. I was digging through debris, and recovering aspects of what happened,” Hayes said. “I didn't really get to do a whole lot, as far as the radiological component goes, and I felt a little bitter about that. I had just recently been trained by the United States Army on technical escort and hazard materials operations. I had all this training, all these certificates, and I was literally shoveling debris. I was grumpy about it, and I decided I needed to make a change. I decided right then and there that I was not going to seek a career in the Marine Corps, and I was going to seek a career following some education.”

After completing his bachelor’s degree, Hayes was accepted into the master’s program for health physics at Colorado State University. There, he met Tom Johnson, Ph.D., who helped him become acquainted with the program. Hayes was in Johnson’s office for the first time to learn about the program when he noticed a map of Japan on the wall. Hayes asked Johnson if the University did any work with Fukushima, and the two began discussing Hayes’s background living in the country, as well as his personal experience with the incident.

“He said, ‘Cool, what are you doing this summer?’ I told him, ‘I don't know.’ And he said, ‘It sounds like you're going to Fukushima.’”

After completing his first semester of the program, Hayes traveled back to Japan once more, where he spent three months assisting two veterinary ophthalmologists with “wrangling” wild boar—or inoshishi in Japanese—and mice in the jungles of Fukushima.

“The reason why they were ophthalmologists was that cataracts and cataractogenesis is a hallmark of radiation dose, it's deterministic effect of radiation exposure,” explained Hayes. “They were looking at the lenses of the eyes, looking for lenticular opacities, trying to figure out if there was a dose response from the exposures that these animals were receiving, in the exclusion zone.”

Hayes also took blood samples, harvesting them from 258 wild boars for his own graduate research. He brought the samples to REAC/TS, where he analyzed them, going back and forth between the REAC/TS site in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, back to Fukushima, and even studying macaques at the Wake Forest Primate Center. This research was so promising that Hayes continued it into his doctoral work.

“And so long story short, I somehow went from mice and boar, to working here at REAC/TS,” said Hayes.

The goal of this research is simply to know more. Ultimately, health physicists hope to be able to have more methods of assessing dose or assessing biochemical changes after a person has been exposed to radiation. As more data is collected, researchers will be able to find more accurate methods of field dose assessment for radiation emergencies. Currently, the gold standard for emergency dose assessment is the dicentric chromosome assay. While this form of dose assay is accurate, a drawback is that it’s time-consuming.

Hayes has been with REAC/TS officially since 2022. 

“I'm very excited about this organization. It's a catchall, right?” he said. “The hallmark emergency response is ‘if it exists, there also exists the opportunity for an accident to happen with it.’ So being in emergency response, we have the opportunity to interact with all aspects of radiation sciences, everything from non-ionizing radiation from EMF towers. We've gotten calls from folks that are changing light bulbs on our radio frequency towers. We've gotten calls from people working with actinium 225 in medical settings. We've gotten calls from folks working with the lesser talked about aspects of military applications. We've gotten calls from people that are questionably saying that they've been irradiated by satellites. It really is the catch-all. And I think that variety of applications within health physics is what has attracted me to this particular position.”

Even when Hayes is awakened by a 3 a.m. phone call asking for radiation expertise, he’s excited to do what he loves.

“I might have to slap myself a couple times to wake up, but hey, this might actually be an opportunity for us to do some good, make some changes, do something significant within our field,” he said.