Dear DPF members,  

Please find below the monthly DPF newsletter for August 2025. This newsletter will be archived on the DPF website. If you would like an announcement included in the September 2025 newsletter, please contact the DPF Secretary/Treasurer. Please keep requests to 300 words and submit them by the 10th of the month for consideration. 

DPF is the primary community organization for particle physicists in the United States. You can directly support our activities by making a donation at this link (log in with your APS credentials).  

Best wishes,  

Ken Bloom, DPF Secretary/Treasurer, kenbloom

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Report on DPF Virtual Community Meeting

The Division of Particles and Fields sponsored a virtual Community Meeting on July 31 and August 1, for the purpose of facilitating communication among all interested persons.  The number of registered attendees exceeded 500.  

The first day of the meeting included question/answer sessions with program officers from DOE-OHEP and NSF-EPP; a report on the European Strategy; a summary of the National Academies Report, "Elementary Particle Physics: The Higgs and Beyond"; presentations on the status of the Fermilab Director search and on the laboratory leadership's goals in the interim; status reports on Higgs Factory, Muon Collider, and 10 TeV Wakefield Collider studies; a report on the outcome of the DOE General Accelerator R&D (GARD) program; and discussion of strategies for accelerator workforce development.  

The second day of the meeting included a report on the ESNet HEP requirements review; summaries of DOE initiatives in microelectronics, quantum information science, and AI/ML; overviews about the Coordinating Panel for Advanced Detectors (CPAD) and the Coordinating Panel for Software and Computing (CPSC); and a discussion about the challenges of private funding for high energy physics.  The latter half of the second day featured sessions led by DOE program officers, who provided overviews of the HEP Comparative Review and Early Career Research Programs as well as surveys of opportunities within the Cosmic, Energy, Theory, and Instrumentation frontiers and within the scopes of HEP-QIS, Computational HEP and AI/ML, and HEP Projects.  

We would like to thank the American Physical Society virtual meeting team for their help in making the meeting run smoothly.   APS provided the zoom room and support. 

The agenda of the meeting can be found at https://indico.global/event/14967/.  A follow-up Community Meeting is planned for December 2025.

-Sally Seidel and Heidi Schellman

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Call for nominations for the DPF Executive Committee

The APS Division of Particles and Fields Nominating Committee requests your assistance in identifying candidates to stand for office in this fall’s DPF elections. This year, we will be electing people to these offices:

• Councilor (1 position, 2026-29)

• Vice Chair (1 position, 2026, then Chair Elect in 2027, Chair in 2028, and Past Chair in 2029)

• Executive Committee Member-at-Large (2 positions, 2026-28)

• Early Career Member-at-Large (1 position, must be a postdoctoral researcher, 2026-2027)

• Graduate Student Member (1 position, 2026, can serve two consecutive terms)

We invite you to nominate outstanding colleagues to be on this year’s ballot. Nominations should be submitted here. Self-nominations are welcome. The Nominating Committee works to ensure diversity, equity, and inclusion in all elections, so we ask you to suggest nominees who will represent the diversity of our division membership in all its forms.

Guided by our core values, APS encourages nominations that reflect the full range of talent, distinction, and experience in our field, and supports broad canvassing for professionals across diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and expertise.

All elected candidates will begin their terms on January 1, 2026. More details about current officers and related governance information can be found on the DPF Website. Governance of DPF is an important act of service to our community, and we thank you in advance for helping identify excellent candidates.

Tao Han (on behalf of the DPF Nominating Committee, than@pitt.edu)

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Upcoming DPF Dissertation Award Deadlines - End of August

Nominations for the Mitsuyoshi Tanaka Dissertation Award in Experimental Particle Physics and J. J. and Noriko Sakurai Dissertation Award in Theoretical Particle Physics are due on August 31, 2025 and September 1, 2025, respectively.

For the Sakurai Prize, please nominate theses submitted between September 1, 2024 and August 31, 2025.

Rules and eligibility

Nominations will be accepted for any doctoral student studying at a college or university in North America including their study-abroad programs, for dissertation research carried out in the field of experimental particle physics. The work to be considered must have been accomplished as part of the requirements for a doctoral degree. First-time nominees for the 2026 award must have defended their Ph.D. thesis no earlier than September 1, 2024, and no later than August 31, 2025.

A candidate may be renominated once for this award in the year following their original nomination. In this case a new nomination package must be submitted to the Committee, stating that the candidate had been nominated the previous year.

View all Honors

Guided by our core values, APS encourages nominations that reflect the full range of talent, distinction, and experience in our field, and supports broad canvassing for professionals across diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and expertise.

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DPF Instrumentation and Instrumentation Early Career Awards – Nominations due September 15

The DPF Instrumentation Award and DPF Instrumentation Early Career Award are bestowed annually to honor exceptional contributions to instrumentation advancing the field of particle physics through the invention, refinement, or application of instrumentation and detectors. The awards recognize accomplishments in one or more of the following areas:

• Conceptualization and development of unique instrumentation that has made a significant impact on the field. 

• Demonstration of the innovative use of instrumentation. 

• Stimulation of other researchers to use new techniques and methods. 

• Authorship of research papers or books that have had an influential role in the use of instrumentation.

The DPF Instrumentation Award recognizes outstanding achievements in particle physics instrumentation that have had a major impact on the field through the awardee’s dedication over a substantial portion of an entire career, while the DPF Instrumentation Early Career Award recognizes achievements having a significant impact at an early career stage. For the purpose of this award, the early career stage is taken to be approximately 15 years from a Ph.D. or other terminal degree, with due account for interruptions and other factors in nominees’ careers.

Complete nominations have:

• A nominating letter of not more than 5,000 characters, about two pages.

• A biographical sketch or CV. 

• At least two, but not more than three, seconding letters.

Nominations for the 2025 award will be accepted through Academic Jobs Online (AJO) from now through September 15, 2025. Nominations will remain active for three years. The names and email addresses of the supporting letter-writers should also be included in the nomination packet.

Guided by our core values, APS encourages nominations that reflect the full range of talent, distinction, and experience in our field, and supports broad canvassing for professionals across diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and expertise.

If you have any questions about the award, please contact the CPAD vice-chair Jonathan Asaadi (jonathan.asaadi@uta.edu)

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Nominations for CPAD membership due September 15

DPF invites nominations to serve two-year terms on the Coordinating Panel for Advanced Detectors (CPAD).

We seek candidates based both at universities and laboratories, and of differing seniority.  Currently serving members can be nominated for a second two-year term.  Nominations of members belonging to groups traditionally underrepresented in physics, such as women, LGBT+ scientists, scientists who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC), disabled scientists, and scientists from institutions with limited resources are especially encouraged.

Nomination can be submitted via this form. Nominations are due by September 15, 2025.  Self-nominations are welcome.

We thank outgoing CPAD members: Amy Connolly, Sowjanya Gollapinni, Julia Gonski, Peter Sorenson, and Sven Vahsen.

Questions about CPAD can be directed to Chair Jinlong Zhang (zhangjl@anl.gov) and  Vice Chair Jonathan Asaadi (jonathan.asaadi@uta.edu), and questions about the nomination process can be directed to DPF Chair-Elect Sarah Eno eno@umd.edu).

If you have any questions about the award, please contact the CPAD vice-chair Jonathan Asaadi (jonathan.asaadi@uta.edu)

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Abstract Submission for APS26 Global Physics Summit

The next Global Physics Summit (formerly the April Meeting) will be held March 15-20, 2026 in Denver, Colorado.  Abstracts for contributed presentations will be due on October 23, 2025.  More information can be found at https://www.aps.org/about/partner/global-physics-summit-2026.

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Next DPF Community Meeting

The agenda of the next DPF Community Meeting is being developed now.    We would like to receive input from community members regarding topics that you would like to hear presented and discussed.  Please send your suggestions to:

Sally Seidel, seidel@unm.edu
Heidi Schellman, Heidi.Schellman@oregonstate.edu
Sarah Eno, eno@umd.edu

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Save the Date: DPF26

The 2026 edition of the APS Division of Particles and Fields (DPF) meeting will be held at Fermilab on July 20-24.  More information to come!

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Announcement of the “Annual Reviews of Nuclear and Particle Science” Video Contest

We are writing as the editors of the journal “Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science”.  As the title indicates, we publish each year a volume of 25-page invited reviews on important topics in this area.

There is much discussion these days about how both journals and static review articles are becoming out of date in the current era of internet media.  So far, we still convince experts to write for us and these articles obtain many citations, but we ought to be looking ahead to new forms of media presentation.  For this we senior people need your help.  We will appreciate it if you tell us your suggestions, but it is better if you show us.

With this in mind, we have launched an ARNPS Video Contest.   Please make a 5-minute video explaining to your peers some point of physics within the realm of Nuclear and Particle Science.  The top three videos will be featured on our journal web page -- and there will be cash prizes!   For the rules and contest schedule, please see

https://www.annualreviews.org/page/ARNPS_VideoContest

We emphasize that (1) this contest is specifically for early-career scientists, and (2) these video are not intended for public outreach ("Physics SLAM"s) but rather for peer-to-peer scientific communication.

Good luck!  We are eager to see your presentations.  If this initiative is successful, we hope to make it an annual event.

Best wishes,

Michael Peskin (mpeskin@slac.stanford.edu)

Wick Haxton (haxton@berkeley.edu)

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