Some FECS Executive Committee members attending the annual meeting in Columbus: (from left to right) Kevin Ludwik, Maria Longobardi, Jason Gardner and Sara Clements

For this reason, we are looking for your active collaboration!

What you can do and what we are looking for?

You can be an active member volunteering at our APS meetings and other activities; You can spread our voice in the physics community, or be a mentor to support younger scientists or help us to organize our future events better. We are looking for both early career and more senior scientists to help the community.

This collaboration is a precious opportunity for all of us, to better understand our need, and continue to grow together as a healthy community, to be part of our large family.

Don't miss this opportunity! Stay involved! Please send me an email to share your ideas, to give your availability for being an active member and to ask for more information.

I thank you in advance for all your help!

Let me now spend a few words about our activities at the March and April meetings 2018. Our collaboration with other APS units is continuously growing, and we organized shared sessions with the FIAP, FIP, FPS units at the meetings. We understand that the interests and the needs of our members are different. Many members are working in the industry, and in applied physics, other in the academy and on interdisciplinary studies; We have both US-based and international members, and many of them are interested in science communication and outreach programs. For this reason, we decided to diversify the themes covered in our sessions at the APS meetings and provide a strong connection with other APS units. We tried to offer to the community a broad vision of state of the art and the potential opportunity provided by the physics community in research and outside the laboratories.

At the March Meeting 2018, we had a very well attended session, shared with the FIAP, on data science with speakers from academia and companies like Uber and Netflix where we talked about the possibility offered by this emerging hot field. At the same meeting, we organized with the FIP a session where we presented ongoing and future experiments on condensed matter physics on board of the International Space Station (ISS). At the April meeting, we talked about physics and human rights with our sister unit FIP. During this session, a touching letter, written from her jail cell in Tehran, from the Andrey Sakharov Prize 2018Narges Mohammadi an Iranian physicist, engineer, and human rights defender was read by her friend Nayereh Tohidi. In another session, organized with the FPS, we discussed science communication, demonstrating how physicists can be involved in politics and educational programs and how communication can increase the effectiveness of presenting scientific data.

For the next year, we are currently organizing new sessions with our sister APS Units and I would like to extend a warm invitation to you to join us for the APS March and April meetings in 2019.

In Columbus, during the April meeting 2018, we had our annual Executive Committee meeting. I want to thank all the Executive Committee Members for their precious participation and support during the annual meeting and during the year. Thank you all and to everyone who contributed to the success of the first two years of the FECS unit!

I hope to hear soon from you all for being involved as an active FECS member and feel free to contact me with any suggestions of how we can better serve the cause of early career scientists!

With warm regards,

Maria Longobardi