Forum For Early Career Scientists (FECS) Sessions at the Upcoming APS Meetings

Jason S Gardner, Chair-Elect – Forum For Early Career Scientists, NSRRC, Taiwan

Jason S Gardner

Dr. Jason S Gardner

As a new forum, we were delighted to be asked to create an invited session at both the March and April 2018 APS meetings. We maximised our contribution and exposure by co-hosting this quota with other APS units. The March 2018 meeting will be held in Los Angeles, CA between the 5th and 9th of March with about 10,000 expected attendees. The April meeting has a slightly different format and each session has only three invited speakers. This meeting will be held on April 14-17th in Columbus, OH, and will have the theme “Quarks to the Cosmos (Q2C)". In partnership with the Forum in International Physics (FIP), we will be co-hosting the Andrei Sakharov Prize session at the April 2018 meeting.

APS March Meeting, March 5-9, 2018 in Los Angeles, CA

APS March Meeting 2018

Session 1 – Condensed Matter Experiments on the ISS (co-sponsored by FIP) – This will be held during the mid-morning session (11:15-2:15) on Friday, March 9th. Eric Furth (University of Delaware), Joe MacClennan (University of Colorado, Boulder), Hubertus Thomas (German Aerospace Center), John Goree (University of Iowa), Rob Thompson (NASA, Jet Propulsion Lab), and David Weitz (Harvard University) will discuss their work on colloids, plasmas, fluids and ultracold atoms on the International Space Station.

Session 2 –Data Science as the Driving Force for Industrial Physics (co-sponsored by FIAP) – This session will feature speakers discussing the collection and use of large data sets in an industrial setting. Speakers include: Neil Johnson from the University of Miami, recently awarded the Joseph A. Burton Forum Award by the APS; Sergey Yurgenson from DataRobot and St. Petersburg State University; Bryce Meredig from Citrine Informatics; David Purdy from Uber; and Sundeep Das from Netflix. This dynamic session will be held during the early morning session on Wednesday the 7th of March.

APS April Meeting, April 14-17, 2018 in Columbus, OH

APS April Meeting 2018

We will co-host two sessions at the April meeting covering human rights and outreach. We expect these sessions to be well attended and believe it is important that young researchers realize they have a voice in these two important issues.

Session 1 – Physicists and Human Rights (co-sponsored by FIP) – This session will provide a platform for this year’s recipients of the Andrei Sakharov Prize. In 2018, the co-recipients of this prize are Narges Mohammadi and Ravi Kuchimanchi. Narges Mohammadi is currently imprisoned in Iran so she will be represented by her brother Hamidreza Mohammadi. Ravi Kuchimanchi will represent himself and present “Parity in our world and in physics”. The third speaker in this session on physicists and human rights was selected by FECS. This will be Shelly Lesher of the University of Wisconsin at LaCrosse. The session will begin on Monday the 16th of April at 10:45.

Session 2 – Getting the Word Out (co-sponsored by FPS) – Saturday 14th April at 10:45. This session will feature three speakers in a discussion of the importance to scientists of disseminating their work to the widest audience possible. Drs. Bevitt, Silverberg, and Quider from Australia, Havard, and Northern Illinois University respectively will discuss how they do it and what people expect.

These sessions are often a bit different from the usual sessions championed by larger units like the divisions, but they are just as important. If you are at either of the meetings, please look out for our session and those of other forums, especially our sponsorship partners in 2018. These sessions are often more diverse, informative, and a nice break from hard-core scientific data.

In addition to these invited sessions, the FECS will co-host two receptions during the March meeting with our friends from FIP and FIAP. If you will be at the March meeting, please do come by. Another FECS member will send out a reminder of this event before the March meeting.

In 2019, the APS will bring together both the March and April meetings, and participants will meet in Boston. This joint meeting will allow the forum to reach out to an even more diverse community beyond scientists, so we should take advantage of this opportunity. The program committee welcomes any suggestions for titles of sessions and/or individual speakers for the 2019 sessions. Please go to FECS Executive web page and email the chair-elect with your ideas.

After obtaining his Ph.D. at Warwick University in the UK, Jason worked for several national laboratories in North America before moving to Sydney, Australia in 2013. From Sydney, he manages a group of five people performing neutron scattering at ANSTO, Australia, and around the world. He is currently the Neutron Group Leader at the National Synchrotron Radiation Research Center, Taiwan. His scientific interests are primarily in frustrated magnets, but he’s also performed research in many areas of condensed matter over thirty years of research. He has published over 120 papers and in 2008 was made a fellow of the Institute of Physics (UK). Jason is also a member-at-large of the APS Forum on International Physics.