GPER at the 2025 APS Global Physics Summit
By: Michael Loverude, GPER Chair-Elect, and Natasha Holmes, GPER Chair
We have just wrapped up the 2025 Global Physics Summit in Anaheim, California. One of the goals of GPER in the last several years has been to enhance the opportunities for research talks by members of the PER community, and GPER-sponsored sessions continued their dramatic growth. As you might have heard too many times, contributed GPER talks have grown from five in 2022 to 105 in 2025. Due to our growth, we were able to support two invited sessions and five mini-symposia at this years’ conference, including 11 invited talks. Several of the speakers were giving their first APS invited talk. Two additional invited speakers presented in a mini-symposium session co-sponsored with our friends at the Forum on Education (FEd) on PER Validated Surveys and Inventories.
As 2025 is the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, there were three GPER sessions focusing on PER in Quantum: an invited session, a mini-symposium, and a focused discussion led by Gina Passante. Participants included many authors of the recent PRPER Focused Collection on Quantum PER and FC Guest Editor Brian Lane led off the mini-symposium with an invited talk. The invited session included three of the focused collection authors: John Thompson, Victoria Borish, and Philipp Bitzenbauer.
This is also the 20th anniversary of the creation of the Phys Rev journal for PER. This milestone was the occasion for an invited session with a talk by outgoing editor Charles Henderson and two talks examining data on authorship and publication trends by Meagan Sundtrom and Tor Ole Odden. We also celebrated with a cake and reception (see below).
Other mini-symposia and invited speakers included Dual Process Theories of Reasoning (Mac Stetzer), Emerging Methods in PER (Eric Brewe), GenAI, Machine Learning, and LLM in PER (Zhongzhou Chen), and Current Topics in Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility. The invited speaker for the last session and one of our new GPER APS Fellows, Vashi Sawtelle, was unable to participate after grant support was pulled.
We have had some growing pains, in terms of room size and parallel sessions, with conflicts including relevant sessions from other units like FEd and FDI. In our coming bylaws revision, we are planning to restructure the program committee to include both the Vice Chair and Chair-Elect because the job has outgrown what a single person can do well. This past year we had the able support of current Past Chair Jackie Chini and it was still a huge task.
This year we enacted a new policy to have members of the community serve as ‘microphone runners’ for the Q&A in GPER sessions. The micrunners brought the microphone to questioners and worked to ensure equitable question distribution. (It turned out to be very useful in crowded rooms as well.) Thanks to GPER exec members Meagan Sundstrom and Andi Piña for their efforts in coordinating, and to all our micrunners for their great work!
The format that combines March and April meetings will continue with a joint meeting in Denver, March 16-20, 2026. Abstract deadlines for this past year were late October, so plan for something similar. GPER will be sending out a survey for suggestions for speakers and topics very soon!
