Winter 2023 Newsletter

The results are in for the annual FIAP election and two officers have been elected. Below are brief introductions to each of them. Thanks to the Nominating Committee and Deniz Ertas, the Election Coordinator, for their work to complete the election before the deadline!

Vice Chair: Marilena Longobardi, University of Basel

The major responsibility of the Vice Chair is organizing the annual March Meeting program. Maria will be responsible for the FIAP program for the 2025 conference in Los Angeles. The Vice Chair progresses each year through Chair Elect, Chair, and Past Chair positions on the FIAP Executive Committee. 

Maria (Marilena) Longobardi holds a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Salerno, with joint supervision from the University of California, Berkeley. After completing her Ph.D., she worked as a postdoc at the Italian Institute of Technology before joining the University of Geneva, where she focused her research on the electronic properties of low-dimensional and atomic-scale hybrid systems. Currently, Maria works as Scientific Coordinator of the National Center of Competence (NCCR) SPIN at the University of Basel, specializing in Quantum Computing with semiconductor qubits. Maria has held various APS leadership roles including founding and leadership of the Forum on Early Career Scientists (FECS), which quickly became one of the largest APS Units. FECS continues to have a robust partnership with FIAP. Presently, she chairs the Committee for Informing the Public and has previously served as Past Chair of the Topical Group on Data Science. In 2021, she was awarded Inspiring Fifty as one of the 50 most inspiring women in Tech and Science in Italy. In 2022, Maria was also nominated for Inspiring Fifty Europe and elected as a 2022 American Physical Society Fellow.

Councilor: James Adams, NIST

The FIAP Councilor represents FIAP and other APS units on the APS Council. Jim is completing a term as Councilor and he is enthusiastic to serve for another four years. 

Jim (James) Adams is the Director of the NIST Center for Neutron Research, a world-leading, national user-facility focusing on the application of neutron physics to problems in condensed-matter physics and materials science and engineering. He leads a staff of approximately 300 scientists and engineers engaged principally in neutron scattering from condensed-matter systems. The Center operates the largest research reactor in the U.S. and serves approximately 2500 users annually from industry and academia. Prior to taking on the NCNR Directorship, Dr. Adams served as Chief of the NIST Radiation Physics Division where he led an applied research program in nuclear science and technology. Jim’s long-standing service to APS includes FIAP Councilor, FIAP Representative to the APS Panel on Public Affairs, Member, APS Innovation Fund, APS Strategic Plan Subcommittee, and he is an Inaugural Member of the APS Honors and Awards Revocation Committee.

The March Meeting will be over before another FIAP Newsletter is issued, so this will serve as a reminder to register early and plan to attend March 3-8, 2024, in Minneapolis. Many sessions will also be broadcast live. Early registration through January 17.

FIAP will be organizing or co-organizing 10 invited sessions under the leadership of Abram Falk, FIAP Vice Chair. The theme for Industry Day will be Advancing Physics for 125 Years. We hope you will attend or tune in remotely and learn about the exciting contributions physicists are making to advancing science and technology in industry, academia, and national labs.

Every year FIAP awards a $1000 prize for a paper presented by a student (graduate or undergraduate) at the March Meeting. The student nominated for the award must be the lead author of the paper and must present the paper at the APS March meeting, with a subject matter pertinent to applied industrial physics. The nominee must be a student at the time of the submission deadline for the meeting. A letter of nomination from the student’s faculty advisor or industrial/government lab mentor must be received by Feb 11, 2024, and self-nominations are not accepted. Students, talk to your advisor/mentor to see if you can be nominated for this award! More information and details at this link.

Do you have an internship, REU, or Fellowship opening in your company, lab, or institute? Soon it will be time to recruit for summer 2024, and the APS Physics Jobs Center is an ideal place to advertise to an audience of physics students. Better yet, there’s no charge!  It’s easy to list your position, just fill out the form at this link.

Undergraduate and graduate students can find existing openings at this link. Career counselors highly recommend an internship as an excellent way to check out areas where students might want to work. Take a look and see if you can find the next step in your path to a physics career!

Note: REU = Research Experience for Undergraduates

Guest Article by Larry Woolf

The mission of IUPAP, the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, is to assist in the worldwide development of physics, to foster international cooperation in physics, and to help in the application of physics toward solving problems of concern to humanity.  Yet the IUPAP had no representation from industry until the IUPAP General Assembly established a Working Group on Physics and Industry in 2017 - Working Group 16 (WG16).  

WG16 was charged to develop recommendations on how IUPAP could strengthen its connections to physicists working in industry.  WG16 members were recruited and started meeting in March 2020. A summary report with recommendations was issued in July 2021.  The report included surveys of how other professional societies interacted with industry and concluded with recommendations.  Those recommendations included creating Corporate Associate Members (CAMs) with defined benefits, where CAMs could be research organizations or commercial companies.  Other recommendations included collecting and disseminating international resources involving career preparation, the value of physics to society, how physics can contribute to the well-being of society and the sustainability of the planet, and mentoring of physics students by industrial physicists. 

WG16 converted these recommendations into actions.  There are now 5 new CAMs: Advanced Laser Light Source - ALLS (Canada), European Organization for Nuclear Research - CERN (Switzerland), Joint Institute for Nuclear Research - JINR (Russia), Synchrotron-Light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East – SESAME (Jordan), and Park Systems Corp. (South Korea).  

Benefits of being a CAM include the following:

• CAMs can make nominations and hold positions in IUPAP 

• IUPAP will connect CAMs with IUPAP Territorial Members who represent key stakeholders, industry insiders, and decision makers to create partnerships to address societal grand challenges and other topics of interest to the CAMs

• CAMs benefit from reduced participation fees at IUPAP conferences

• CAMs can submit proposals to other CAMs to collaborate on R&D projects

• CAMs can sponsor prizes, awards, or focused initiatives in their field of interest, which will be publicized to all IUPAP members

WG16 also created a web site that documented information about CAMS and their benefits, which is part of the IUPAP web site.  International resources were also developed that involve the Benefits of Physics to Society and the Economy, Grand Challenges in Science and Engineering, Jobs in Physics and Preparation for Careers, and Mentoring Programs for Physics Students Interested in Industrial Careers.  Also created was a Linked-In profile for IUPAP that currently has over 900 followers.

WG16 consists of 13 members from around the world who meet on a monthly basis.  A current focus is on recruiting more companies to become CAMs and also determining what additional benefits would be attractive to companies.  If you have suggestions in these areas, please contact the WG16 at  iupap-wg16@cern.ch .

Larry Woolf is the US member of IUPAP Working Group 16. He is a technical fellow at General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc., and President of the General Atomics Sciences Education Foundation. He currently serves as chair of the APS Committee on Education and as a member of the EP3 Editorial Board.

Suggestions for the Newsletter are welcome, comments too.

Please email the Newsletter Editor Steven Lambert at SELsanjose@gmail.com