Meeting Minutes

March 14, 2006

Business Meeting Minutes

Officers Present: Mark Ratner, Dan Neumark, Bruce Garrett, Mike Duncan, Nancy Levinger, Branka Ladanyi

Others Present: about 6 other DCP members were present

  1. Mark Ratner introduced the DCP Executive Committee and provided results of the recent election: Will Castleman was elected Vice Chair and Gil Nathanson was elected Member-at- Large. Mike Duncan and Mark Ratner, whose terms ended at the conclusion of the March meeting, were thanked for their hard work and contributions to the division.

  2. New APS Fellows from the DCP were announced. Robert Levis and Nancy Levinger were in attendance to accept their awards.

  3. The nine recipients of Graduate Student Travel Awards were announced: Heather Abbott, Elizabeth Carroll, Chong Fang, Jamie Gengler, John Glennon, Shih-Hui Jen, Brandon McNaughton, Hongxia Ning, and Xiaoying Sun.

  4. Bruce Garrett presented a financial report. The balance at the end of the last fiscal year (ending December 2005) was 82,801, which is an increase of 5,308 from the previous year.

  5. Mark Ratner present a status report of APS prizes sponsored by DCP. Progress was made on stabilizing funding for the Langmuir prize. Thanks go to Mark Ratner for his effort to secure funding for this prize.

  6. Bruce Garrett presented our membership statistics for 2005. DCP membership dropped to 1742 last year, down from 1758 the year before. Suggestions for increasing membership included:

    • Send out email to current members encouraging them to recruit their colleagues who are not currently members.

    • Provide refreshments at DCP business meeting, advertise it at sessions and in newsletter, and have membership forms at the business meeting.

    • Cross post email to other divisions (e.g., DAMOP) ) inviting their members to join the DCP.

    • Create a postdoc clearing housing for posting jobs available and jobs wanted

  7. Hai-Lung Dai was recognized for putting together an excellent DCP program at the 2006 March Meeting.

  8. Ideas for DCP focus topics at next years March Meeting were solicited. Dan Neumark provided a list of ideas and requested suggestions on those ideas and well as new ideas. Focus topics for 2007 will be selected from the following list:

    • Electron solvation in clusters and solution

    • Probing chemical dynamics with ultrafast x-rays and electrons

    • Spectroscopy and Dynamics at Liquid Interfaces

    • Role of Conical Intersections in Experiment and Theory

    • Charge transport in nanostructures

    • Properties of Aerosols

    • Frontiers in Electronic Structure Theory, or something more specifically devoted to excited states

    • Protein Structure and Dynamics

    • Advances in Microscopy

    • Cluster-assembled materials, or some other nano/materials symposium

    • Quantum Computing

    • Atmospheric spectroscopy and kinetics

    • Nonlinear spectroscopy

    • Dynamics of Biological Molecules

    • Astrochemistry

  9. The Dependent Child Care Award received no applicants in its first year. We discussed how to raise its visibility and attract applicants. We decided to do the following:

    • Run an article and advertisements for the award in the The Gazette, which is the newsletter of the APS Committee on the Status of Women in Physics

    • Change the DCP web site to highlight the DCCA more prominently

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