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Sites in seven countries expand opportunities for participation and collaboration.
Author: Mackenzie Priraman April 12, 2024
Image credit: Hassan Shahzad/National Center for Physics
Three participants present their certificates of attendance live on satellite at the March Conference in Islamabad, Pakistan.
Many physicists know that this year’s APS March meeting is held in Minnesota. Few people realize that the conference is also taking place nearly 8,000 miles away in the Philippines.
“We rarely have these kind of collaborations or partnerships internationally,” said Andrea Rose Franco, an undergraduate student in the Department of Physics at the University of the Philippines Diliman and vice president of the UP Physics Association (UPPA). So when she received an email from APS in December asking if UPPA could host the March conference event, she said she was excited.
The Philippines is home to one of seven satellite sites in Asia, Africa and South America that hosted an event for the local physics community with support from APS. Michele Irwin, APS senior international program manager, said these events help engage scientists from outside the United States and strengthen APS’s overseas partnerships.
The COVID-19 pandemic has restricted travel and in-person gatherings for many, which first sparked the idea of hosting a satellite event. “We want to give people the opportunity to participate in the March meeting without having to travel,” Owen said.
The March 2022 meeting is the first of a pilot program with four satellite sites. That number has nearly doubled this year, with sites in the Philippines, Nepal, Cameroon, Brazil, Pakistan, Jordan and Hong Kong. Each local event looks different.
Image source: Sunny Xin Wang/Hong Kong Physical Society
Participants listen to a speech at a satellite conference in Hong Kong.
In the Philippines, Franco and her co-organizer Thoreenz Soldevilla arranged a virtual meeting to introduce UPPA and provide an opportunity for two early career scientists to present their undergraduate research. “This is a way for our undergraduate students to showcase their skills,” said Soldevilla, a physics undergraduate at the University of the Philippines Diliman and UPPA’s external affairs assistant.
In early May, the two will host a watch party for some of the March meeting’s virtual sessions, where local physicists will be on hand to help explain the science, as part of UPPA’s annual Physics Month campaign to make physics more accessible to the public. study.
Meanwhile, at a three-day live satellite event in Jordan, about 100 researchers from nearly a dozen institutions gathered to watch live sessions during the March conference, organizer Gihan Kamel ), who is the chief scientist of Synchrotron-light. Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East (SESAME). But the highlight of the local conference was a virtual session focused on women in physics.
“For nine years, I was the only female scientist at SESAME,” Carmel said. Kamal noted that women in the Middle East face many restrictions from family, tradition, culture and religion, although another woman recently joined the institution as a researcher.
But Kamal recognizes that the gender gap in science is a worldwide problem. So she invited women from around the world, all of whom were connected to SESAME, to discuss their career paths and research. They have “different perspectives, different problems, different difficulties,” Carmel said. “But at the end of the day, we all face the same problem.” This is Kamal’s second year organizing a satellite event in Jordan.
Brazil also hosted the March Conference satellite site for the second year in a row. “It brings people from St. Paul and the greater St. Paul community together to not only attend the APS meeting, but to talk and collaborate with each other,” said organizer Nathan Berkovits, a professor at the Institute for Theory Studies at St. Paul State. University physicist and director of the ICTP South American Fundamental Research Institute.
The one-day event, attended by approximately 30 people, included live presentations by students and postdocs as well as virtual sessions where speakers discussed their research on complex systems.
But hosting events abroad does have its challenges. For example, Berkowitz said it can be difficult to get people watching meetings online to participate and ask questions.He proposed joint virtual meetings, with some talks taking place at satellite sites and some at the main U.S. March meeting location
Organizer Paul Woafo, professor of physics at the University of Yaoundé I and founder and former president of the Cameroon Physical Society, said the hybrid nature of the event also created some difficulties for the two-day event in Cameroon. Nonetheless, five physicists from the country presented research results on applied nonlinear dynamics at a virtual conference, and more than 40 researchers, many of them students, attended the in-person session.
Photo credit: Paul Waofo/Cameroon Institute of Physics
Participants at the satellite conference in Yaounde, Cameroon.
Overall, satellite event organizers say they are happy to be working with APS, and Irving feels the same way. “We have a lot of contacts and colleagues around the world,” she said. These satellite sites are “very simple and we can work together on them.”
McKenzie Prillaman is a science writer living in Washington, D.C.
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