Letter from the Chair

It has been another exciting year for the Forum on Outreach and Engaging the Public and thanks goes to all the members who have contributed to very successful March and April meetings. We’re looking forward to growing on this to even better meetings leading up to the 10th anniversary of the Forum in 2020! Here are some highlights from this year.

1) FOEP sponsored workshop at the APS March Meeting: Finding your scientific voice

Following on the successful FOEP-hosted workshop of last year, we again put on workshops at the APS March Meeting for postdocs and students to improve their communication skills. Two 3-hour workshops allowed participants to learn best practices for communicating scientific results to an audience in the 10 minute talks typically given at the meeting. These workshops also help improve communication to the general public. Given the very positive feedback we received, FOEP intends to sponsor these workshops again at the APS March Meeting and possibly a workshop on written communication at the April meeting.

2) FOEP Invited Speaker sessions at the APS March and April Meetings.

We had exciting and very inspiring talks from leaders in engaging the public from the international to the local scale! Joe Niemala (ICTP) discussed the planning and execution of the International Year of Light celebration. Jorge Cham described the origin of his PhD Comics and web-based comic and video on the discovery of the Higgs Boson. Sam Sampere (Syracuse U.) and Tatiana Erukhimova (Texas A&M) described building outstanding outreach programs from a university physics department. Clara Moskowitz, Senior Editor for Scientific American, talked about how to publish articles in her iconic magazine. Renee Horton (NASA) discussed how to effectively reach diverse audiences while Lucianne Walkowicz (Adler Planetarium and Library of Congress) presented ways to meet the public in everyday settings for science outreach. Becky Thompson (APS) discussed the amazing efforts of the APS Public Outreach office in producing everything from thousands of school kits to a superheroine comic book.

These invited talks at the March and April meetings provide unmatched opportunities for inspiration and idea-gathering on how to share our scientific journeys with the public. We are always looking for ideas for future speakers, particularly from young scientists who form the largest single component of FOEP membership. We need your input! Please send your suggestions to FOEPAPSnewsletter@gmail.com. And be sure to check out the FOEP sessions at next year’s meetings.

3) Contributed talks at the March and April meetings

These talks cover the incredible range of outreach practiced by our members that truly show that outreach and engaging the public is for everyone. This year’s talks displayed the breadth and diversity of efforts from using historical figures like Marie Curie to inspire STEM interest, to high-end video production inspired by the long-running University of Minnesota Physics Force shows, to examining the intersection between Lakota cosmology and particle physics! Superheroes and music, nanotechnology and physics competitions – the intersections of physics interest and people is staggering and you can hear about them only at the Contributed Talk sessions of FOEP. All of the APS Forum Contributed talks are considered non-technical talks so they can be given in addition to your technical science presentation at the same APS meeting. The Executive Committee strongly encourages you to volunteer to speak and to come to these sessions. Creative ideas can only disseminate if we share our stories.

4) Staged play reading at the March Meeting

As we have in the past, FOEP once again joined with Brian Schwartz (CUNY) and other APS units (Forum on the History of Physics, Forum on Physics & Society, Committee on the Status of Women in Physics, and the Division of Astrophysics) to sponsor a staged reading of a play for APS members and the general public. This year Brian was joined by Smitha Vishveshwara (University of Illinois) to present a reading of the play Silent Sky by the International City Theatre of Long Beach CA. This play is based on the true story of 19th-century astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt and her personal journey at the Harvard Observatory in the early 1900’s – a time of history-making scientific ferment but also a time when women’s substantial contributions to science were suppressed or overlooked. As per usual, the reading was informative and entertaining and made even more so by the talkback discussion with the play actors and a historian-scientist after the staged reading.

5) Free beer and snacks for FOEP members at the APS Happy Hour hosted by Becky Thompson

Once again, there was great turnout for our Happy Hour at the March meeting. Becky Thompson has been a constant partner to FOEP and a source of energy and imaginative ideas for all the years of FOEP’s existence. Please show her your appreciation at one of next year’s meetings.

Welcome to our new members and plaudits for our new projects

The Executive Committee works very hard to plan and carry out FOEP programming for the upcoming year. Right now that includes bringing a physical science-based escape room to the 2019 March meeting, new training workshops to the March and April meetings and, of course, talks by leading science communicators. The year 2020 marks the 10th year of FOEP’s existence and we are busy planning a huge Pop-up Science Expo event for the March meeting of that year. Planning for a Science Expo is just beginning in earnest. We need your dynamic ideas to make this a memorable and impactful event for APS and the general public in Denver in 2020! Please consider donating time and effort when the general call goes out through this newsletter in the Spring of 2019. Of course we are eager to hear any ideas you have right now.

I want to sincerely thank the current members of FOEP for their efforts in promoting our science and especially to the Executive Committee for several years of personal learning and fun. Now that the election for new ExCom members is complete, I want to welcome them to the fold. Shannon Swilley Greco of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory becomes the Vice Chair of FOEP. Chad Orzel of Union College and Jon Schuller of UC Santa Barbara become the new Members at Large. All three take on their new roles in January 2019. Thanks in advance for the creativity and energy I know you will add!

Finally, the entire Executive Committee wishes to add its sincerest thanks to Itai Cohen and Heide Doss. Itai moves off the Executive Committee at the end of the calendar year. Itai has been not only an effective leader for FOEP, but an inspiring teacher. For the past two years he has run the Finding Your Voice workshops at the March meetings. These have garnered universal comments of praise and thanks from those who have participated. Heide has been a Member at Large and Editor of this newsletter for several years. It’s not possible to imagine FOEP without her. While Heide leaves the Member at Large role at the end of the year, we are very fortunate that she will remain in charge of the newsletter for at least another year. She is indispensable. We wish you well Itai and thanks for staying on board Heide!

The FOEP Executive Committee members for 2019 will be:

Past Chair: Larry Gladney
Chair: Don Lincoln
Chair-Elect: Jim Kakalios
Vice Chair: Shannon Swilley Greco
Secretary/Treasurer: E. Dan Dahlberg
Members at Large: Shireen Adenwalla, Kathleen Hinko, Chad Orzel, Jon Schuller
FGSA representative: Anashe Bandari
APS Staff member: Rebecca Thompson
Assigned Council Representative: Noah Finkelstein
Editor of the FOEP Newsletter: Heide Doss

Feel free to contact any of us with any suggestions of how FOEP can better serve the cause of outreach!

Larry Gladney