From the Chair

Laurie McNeil, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Fall is award season for the American Physical Society (APS), and this is true for its Forum on Education (FEd) as well. The Forum appoints the selection committees for two education awards given out by the APS: The first is the 2020 Excellence in Physics Education Award, which goes to the Open Source Physics Team “for sustained commitment to computational physics education through creating and disseminating programming environments, books, software, simulations, and other tools to support computational thinking, and for research establishing the value of these tools and best practices for their use." You can access the instructional materials for which they are honored on the comPADRE digital library site of the American Association of Physics Teachers at https://www.compadre.org/osp/. If you know of another team that has exhibited a similar “sustained commitment to excellence in physics education,” I urge you to nominate them for the 2021 award. The deadline is 3 June 2020, and information can be found on the FEd website.

The second award the FEd is responsible for is the Jonathan F. Reichert and Barbara Wolff-Reichert Award for Excellence in Advanced Laboratory Instruction. The 2020 winner has not been announced yet (though we expect the announcement soon), but you can already be thinking about potential nominees for the 2021 award. The award honors individuals for their outstanding achievement in teaching, sustaining, and enhancing an advanced undergraduate physics laboratory course. This important work often goes unrecognized (especially beyond the walls of a physics department), so please think about worthy physicists you may know and consider nominating them. Information is available on the FEd website, and the deadline for nominations is the same as that for the Excellence award.

A third award for education is administered by the APS Committee on Education. This is the Award for Improving Undergraduate Physics Education, which recognizes excellence and best practices in undergraduate physics education. If you are a member of a physics department or program that you think exhibits these qualities, please consider submitting an application for this award. The 2020 “Departments (or Programs) of Distinction” will be announced soon, and the deadline for applications for the 2021 awards is 15 June 2020. Details can be found on the APS Education programs website.

It gives me great pleasure to recognize the newly-elected APS Fellows nominated by the FEd Fellowship Committee (led by Past Chair Larry Cain) for their significant contributions to physics education. They are:

Wendy Adams (Colorado School of Mines): "For impactful physics education research and the subsequent development of assessments in the areas of problem solving, student beliefs, and teacher preparation, leading to a range of improvements such as increased student learning and reductions in physics teacher shortages."

Idalia Ramos (University of Puerto Rico at Humacao): "For tireless work on behalf of physics students, especially Hispanic women, and for enthusiasm for research that has inspired generations of many Puerto Rican students to enter physics graduate programs."

Please join me in congratulating all of these outstanding physics colleagues (including those yet to be announced!) for their contributions to our shared educational enterprise.

Fall is also election season, and not just in politics. Members of the FEd should have received (and, I hope, acted on) an e-mail ballot message directing you to the voting website. The balloting closed on 26 October, and the new Vice-Chair, Secretary-Treasurer, and Members-at-Large will begin their terms on 1 January 2020. The Secretary-Treasurer and the Members-at-Large serve for three years, while the Vice-Chair moves up the line to Chair-Elect, Chair, and Past Chair in subsequent years. I appreciate the excellent work of the Nominating Committee (led by FEd Vice-Chair Catherine Crouch) in presenting the membership with an outstanding slate of candidates. I look forward to working with the ones who are elected.

One of the most prominent activities of the Forum is to organize invited sessions on education topics to be presented at the APS March and April meetings. Program Chair (and Chair-Elect) Jerry Feldman and his committee have been hard at work all summer putting together some excellent groups of speakers, and I hope to see some of you at those sessions in Denver in March or in Washington in April.

Finally, I remind you that the Forum’s ability to support and enhance physics education is dependent upon having a robust membership. Please encourage your colleagues to join the Forum—it’s free! APS members can join as many Forums as they like without paying additional dues. The more who do so, the greater the voice education will have within the Society.

Disclaimer – The articles and opinion pieces found in this issue of the APS Forum on Education Newsletter are not peer refereed and represent solely the views of the authors and not necessarily the views of the APS.