Division of Polymer Physics

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May 2013 Newsletter

Inside this Issue

Deadlines

Fellowship nominations are due on June 1st.

Polymer Physics Prize nominations are due on July 1st.

Dillon Medal nominations are due on July 1st.

Programming for 2014

The next APS March Meeting is March 3-7, 2014 in Denver. Organization of this meeting has already begun. Focus sessions and invited sessions are crucial to support our vibrant and changing field. All DPOLY members are encouraged to propose topics for focus and invited sessions for the 2014 APS March meeting. Please contact the 2014 Program Chair, Kari Dalnoki-Veress (dalnoki@mcmaster.ca).

Focus sessions are sessions with typically one invited talk and a series of contributed talks that are organized by 1-3 people who select potential invited speakers and advertise the topic to encourage the submission of contributed abstracts. The main purpose of these sessions is to bring new topics and coordinate particularly active areas of research to the APS meeting. Suggestions for focus sessions are welcome (please use the attached form and email to dalnoki@mcmaster.ca)

Focus Session Proposal Form

Invited sessions are a single session with no contributed talks and 5 invited talks that are each 36 min in duration. Suggestions for invited sessions on a particularly current topic are welcome (please use the attached form and email to dalnoki@mcmaster.ca). Note that we are limited by the number of invited sessions that we have been allocated.

Invited Session Proposal Form

In addition, if you have any general suggestions about the March meeting, please contact Kari via email.

DPOLY and Soft Matter

The DPOLY executive committee has had three phone calls since the March 2013 meeting. We discussed the proposed expansion of DPOLY to include soft matter during each call and the last meeting was devoted exclusively to this issue. The executive committee unanimously voted that our next step is to engage leaders from the various units within APS who have a vested interest in soft matter. We are committed to keeping you posted on our progress and welcome your input.

New Committee Members

In addition to the executive committee, DPOLY has the following six committees: education, fellowship, membership, nominating, program and publicity. Thank you to our new committee members: Al Crosby, Jan Genzer, Enrique Gomez, Lisa Hall, Tim Lodge, Alan Nakatani, Dieter Richter, Zhen-gang Wang. To see the full membership of each committee and their duties visit the Committees web page. If you have ideas for a committee, you are welcome to contact the committee chair.

Website suggestions

Have you visited the DPOLY website lately? Have you easily found the information you were looking for there? The publicity committee values your input, so make recommendations to Amalie Frischknecht, Member-at-Large and Publicity Committee Chair (alfrisc@sandia.gov). Also please email any nice images you would like to have displayed on our website (with appropriate citation-reference-acknowledgement) to Gila Stein (gestein@uh.edu).

APS Opportunities and Directions

Strategic Plan: The APS has a strategic plan for 2013 – 2017. Task forces to address early career issues and open access publication have started. Next will be ones on international engagement, communications (such as APS News), and physics in the private sector. If you are interested in participating at the APS level, please send an email to Steve Hudson (steven.hudson@nist.gov), who will pass your information along to the appropriate group within APS.

Outreach and Education: APS annually awards several grants up to $10,000 to help APS members develop new physics outreach activities. Programs can be for traditional K-12 audiences or projects for engaging the public. Innovative ideas and new approaches are particularly encouraged. The grant process opens in the fall and new grant awards are announced in late spring. See the APS Public Outreach and Grants web page for details. In addition, PhysTEC is a joint APS-American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) project to improve and promote the education of future physics and physical science teachers.

Minority Scholarships: The APS Bridge program (APS-BP) is a scholarship program to increase the number of physics PhDs awarded to underrepresented minority (URM) students, including African American, Hispanic American, and Native American students.

Promotional Media: Physics InSight is a series of slide shows (for download) designed to inform and excite undergraduates about physics. APS hopes these slide shows will be shown in venues frequented by potential physics majors, such as university science buildings.

This DPOLY newsletter was prepared by: Steve Hudson, Secretary-Treasurer; Amalie Frischknecht, Publicity Committee Chair; Karen Winey, Executive Committee Chair. The articles in this newsletter represent the views of their author(s) and are not necessarily those of the Unit or APS.