Roscoe L. Koontz was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1922. He graduated from Vashon High School in St. Louis. His college education at Stowes Teachers College was interrupted by a three-year hitch in the U.S. Army during World War II. While in the army, he received technical training through a special pre-engineering army training program at West Virginia State College. Upon discharge from the army in 1946, he returned to Tennessee State University and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry.

Roscoe Koontz was among the first formally trained Health Physicists by participated in the first Atomic Energy Health Physics Fellowship Training Program, sponsored at the University of Rochester in 1948. As a graduate student at the University of Rochester, Mr. Koontz conducted research on problems concerning neutron dosimetry, toxicology of uranium, plutonium and fission products. At Atomics International, a company in Southern California, which designs reactors, he developed techniques and procedures for measuring absolute thermal neutron fluxes using radioactive indium foils. He designed a pinhole gamma ray camera and collimator and helped to design and fabricate automatic air and water sampling equipment and radiation activity measuring devices. 

Health Physics became a recognized profession around 1942. When Koontz entered the field, there were few rules and guidelines and procedures for Health Physicists to follow. Together with their instructors, the early students, like Koontz, originated many of today's practices, instrumentation and techniques to protect people from the hazards of ionizing radiation. 

Currently, Mr. Koontz is an engineer with Atomics International. His responsibility is planning, directing and controlling all contract efforts on the design of the radioactive waste and sodium disposal system of the Clinch River Breeder Reactor, Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The breeder reactor is not yet a fully developed commercial reactor. Its development is important to help stretch the nation's nuclear energy resources from decades to hundreds of years. It will create or breed more usable fuel than it consumes. In 1983, the U.S. Government canceled the Clinch River Breeder Reactor (375 MWe) program that would have required reprocessing plutonium.