Meeting Minutes

March 6, 2007

Business Meeting Minutes

Officers Present: Hailung Dai, Dan Neumark, Will Castleman, Bruce Garrett, Nancy Levinger, Branka Ladanyi, Gil Nathanson, Charles Parmenter

Others Present: about 10 other DCP members were present

1. Hailung Dai introduced the DCP Executive Committee. Hailung Dai, Nancy Levinger, and Bruce Garrett, 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. Shashi Karna, Stephen Klippenstein, Andrew Rappe, and Michael Springborg were in attendance to accept their awards.

3. The nine recipients of Graduate Student Travel Awards were announced: Nandini Ananth, Kelly Becker, Jiahao Chen, Yanxin Liu, Alexander Prociuk, Kana Takematsu, Heayoung Yoon, Ming Yu, and Jia Zhou

4. The three recipients of the Dependent Child Care Award were announced: Carolina Ilie, Andrea Liu, and Ben Schwartz. We received the three applications in response to a notice sent within 2 weeks of the meeting. We should make the deadline 1-2 weeks before the March meeting and continue advertising it up to the deadline. Last year it was suggested to run an article and advertisements for the award in the Gazette, which is the newsletter of the APS Committee on the Status of Women in Physics.

5. Bruce Garrett presented a financial report. The balance at the end of the last fiscal year (ending December 2006) was 79,227, which is a decrease of 3,574 from the previous year and an increase of 1,733 from 2004.

6. Hailung Dai presented a status report of APS prizes sponsored by DCP. Funding for the Langmuir prize is from GE and is stable. The Plyler prize is funded by generous contributions from Newport Corporation and the Crouch Foundation. We are working to develop long-term funding that is stable. The Broida prize is supported by an endowment and is stable at the current award level.

7. Bruce Garrett presented our membership statistics for 2006. DCP membership rose by 30 (compared to 2005) to 1788. Suggestions for increasing membership included:

   • Send out email to academic members thanking them for their memberships and encouraging students to recruit their colleagues and encouraging professors to recruit their students. Emphasize the Graduate Student Travel Awards and the uniqueopportunity for students to give oral presentations.

   • Develop a glossy flyer for the DCP session at the March meeting.

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

8. Dan Neumark and the focus session organizers were recognized for putting together an excellent DCP program at the 2007 March Meeting.

9. Ideas for DCP focus topics at next years March Meeting were solicited. It was suggested that we include those topics proposed last year that were not focus session this year. Suggestions for focus topics for 2008 include:

   • Spectroscopy and dynamics at liquid interfaces

   • Buried interfaces

   • Aerosols

   • Advances in microscopy

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

   • Quantum computing

   • Atmospheric spectroscopy and kinetics

   • Chemical physics of climate change

   • Nonlinear spectroscopy

   • Dynamics of biological molecules

   • Astrochemistry

   • Biomedical – physics of molecular imaging

   • Determination of structure

   • New methods in spin polarized magnetic resonance spectroscopy

   • Chemical physics of drug delivery

   • Energy focus, e.g., solar energy

   • Quantum size effects

10. Ideas for how the DCP can better serve its membership were solicited. The following suggestions were received:

    • Start a best presentation award for undergraduates giving oral presentations at the March meeting.

    • Communicate more regularly with the DCP membership by email

    • Alternate focus sessions so we don’t have all day (8:00 AM to 5:00 PM) on the same topic (Dan Neumark notes that this may not be workable)