Letter from the Chair
Warm thanks to outgoing SESAPS Executive Committee members and welcome of new ones: Please join me in expressing gratitude to our retiring SESAPS Executive Committee Members. Their hard work in this purely voluntary capacity helps to make physics an exciting and rewarding career choice for students in the southeast. Thank you to Prof. Paul Cottle of Florida State U for his four years of service in the chair line and Prof. Matthew Edwards of Alabama A&M for his service as Member-at-Large from Jan 2008 to Dec. 2011. Prof. Laurie McNeil (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) retires from her role as Chair to become SESAPS Past Chair; Richard Haglund (Vanderbilt) moves from Vice Chair to Chair-Elect; and we welcome our newest members: Mary Ellen Zvanut (University of Alabama Birmingham) as Vice Chair and John Yukich (Davidson College) as Member-at-Large for the Jan 2012 to Dec 2015 term.
Notes on SESAPS 2011: The SESAPS 2011 annual meeting was held from Oct. 19-22 in Roanoke Virginia, hosted by Virginia Tech and local organizers Leo Piilonen, Michel Pleimling, and Beate Schmittmann (chair of the VT Physics Dept). Nearly 300 physicists participated from all over the SESAPS region, including Puerto Rico. Two sessions were held to celebrate physics milestones: the 100th anniversary of the discovery of the atomic nucleus (organized by Paul Cottle, FSU), and the 100th anniversary of the discovery of superconductivity (organized by Norman Mannella of U. Tennessee). The program and slides can be found on their website. Congratulations to the co-winners of the "Best Undergraduate Poster Presentation" contest: Christopher Frye of the University of Central Florida, "Identifying Electromagnetic Events in the Forward Hadron Calorimeter" and William Love of Virginia Tech, "Characterization of large-scale velocity fluctuations in the Princeton MRI experiment." Honorable mention was earned by two students from the North Carolina School of Science and Math: Mithi de los Reyes, "Use of Spray Adhesives for the Manufacture of 3-D Capillary Origami Microstructures" and Nishkala Shivakumar, "Acoustic Radiation from Smart Foam for Various Foam Geometries." Congratulations to the co-winners of the "Best Undergraduate Oral Presentation" contest: David Abbott from the University of Virginia, "Study of the Sensitivity of Plastic Scintillators to Fast Neutrons" and Ahmed Roman of Virginia Tech, "Boundary conflicts and cluster coarsening: Waves of life and death in the cyclic competition of four species."
The care and feeding of SESAPS history: The history of the SESAPS organization is a long and rich one. To help document it and make information available to future generations, the American Institute of Physics’ Neils Bohr Library and Archives has an agreement to accept material on SESAPS. If you have material you would like to share, please contact Amanda Nelson, Archivist. You will receive a deed of gifts for records received. Please look in the basement of your department and see if you have any historical jewels collecting dust there.
New rules on student travel fellowships: In order to be eligible for a student travel fellowship, valid for travel to make a presentation at an annual SESAPS meeting, you now need to be a member of SESAPS. This is free once you are a member of the APS. And the APS is currently offering a one year free trial membership for new student members. To apply for a SESAPS travel fellowship, see Student Travel Grants. The deadline for applying is one week after the abstract deadline. The abstract deadline for SESAPS 2012 is 19 Sep 2012.
New method for producing SESAPS bulletin – going green: While the APS provides a web-site version of annual meeting schedules and abstracts, and the local organizers have a local web-site specific to their annual meeting, in the past SESAPS has paid an external vendor to typeset a hard-copy bulletin booklet. Some Sections do not provide hard copies to meeting registrants; some pay the APS several thousands of dollars each meeting to create one. In an effort to divert money into the student fellowship funds from the funds we previously spent on providing the bulletin booklet, this year we are trying something new. We will provide a pdf file of the information. Ideally, people will download that pdf onto their handheld device to access off-line (connectivity can be a problem at these large meetings). Some may prefer to print out copies at home to take with them. A modest number of hard copies will also be made available at the meeting site. For a rough version of what the pdf looks like using 2011 data (minus the preamble info, which will be present for 2012), see the following template from 2011. If you object to the new format, please email me about it.
Upcoming SESAPS elections: You will shortly be receiving email ballots asking you to vote for new SESAPS Executive Committee Members. Please participate. This is also a good opportunity for you to consider if you would like to serve SESAPS yourself by nominating someone (including yourself) to run in the 2013 (next year's) election. Please contact me if you would like to do so and I will share the information with the next Vice-Chair, who will run the next election.
Below please find sections that provide information on SESAPS 2012, our promotional drive for new SESAPS members, and information about SESAPS awards.
I look forward to seeing you at SESAPS 2012 in Tallahassee!
Best regards,
Roxanne P. Springer
Professor of Physics
Duke University