Larry Cain, Davidson College

I would like to bring you up to date on the activities of the Forum on Education (FEd) that occurred this past summer and will occur this fall. Our revised bylaws continue to become part of our operations. January 1 is now the beginning of officer terms, so at the end of 2018 three members of the current Executive Committee (ExComm) will rotate off the ExComm. I would like to thank John Stewart, outgoing Past Chair, for four years of excellent service on the chair line. He has chaired the nominating committee, the program committee, the Forum, and the fellowship committee in successive years. He has revised our bylaws to make our operations smoother and more structured. Thanks also to Lux Martinez-Miranda and Toni Sauncy for their outstanding work and contributions as members-at-large for the last three years. All three will be missed and I wish them well in their future work for physics education.

This fall we will elect new members of the ExComm. The Nominating Committee chaired by Vice Chair Jerry Feldman has been working over the summer to select the next slate of FEd candidates. We will elect a new vice chair and two new members-at-large as usual, but we will also elect a graduate student member of the ExComm for the first time. This new position was established in our revised bylaws. Please remember to vote when you receive the ballot this fall. Your input is needed to help the Forum remain strong and support physics education. Jerry describes the process below.

The Program Committee chaired by Chair Elect Laurie McNeil has been working over the summer and has finished the program for next year’s March meeting in Boston and April meeting in Denver. The committee has created an excellent array of talks at these meetings. I encourage you to attend these meetings and the FEd education sessions. Laurie describes the programs later in this newsletter.

The awards committees have also been busy this summer. They have finished their work selecting new APS Fellows, the Excellence in Physics Education Award awardee, and the Jonathan F. Reichert and Barbara Wolff-Reichert Award for Excellence in Advanced Laboratory Instruction awardee. The latter two awards will not be announced until late October. However, the APS Fellows have been announced by APS. Please congratulate the following new APS Fellows who were nominated by FEd: Diola Bagayoko (Southern University and A&M College), Amy L. R. Graves (Swarthmore College) and Heather Lewandowski (University of Colorado, Boulder). I want to encourage you to think about nominating persons (or group as appropriate) for the above APS education-related awards and for APS Forum on Education Fellowship for next year. We all know of deserving colleagues for these awards and for fellowship, but we must nominate them for them to be considered.

FEd also works closely with the APS Committee on Education (COE), with the past chair, chair and chair-elect of FEd being members of the COE. In this way, the Forum maintains an active voice in physics education in the American Physical Society. An award given by the COE is the Award for Improving Undergraduate Education. I encourage nominations for that education award.

A new committee established in the bylaws is the Membership Committee. FEd has slowly lost members over the years as the APS has grown. This committee hopes to find ways to encourage more APS members to join the Forum as it works to keep physics education in the foreground for APS members. APS members can join any number of Forums for free. I encourage newsletter readers to recruit colleagues and other APS members to FEd. We can be successful only by having an engaged and broad membership in the Forum.

The ExComm is currently in the process of identifying a person to be the new Editor-in-Chief of the FEd newsletter. The new Editor-in-Chief will begin work later this fall and will work with current editor Richard Steinberg in creating the Spring newsletter before taking over for the Summer 2019 newsletter. I will contact the FEd membership when a new Editor-in-Chief is elected.

Disclaimer – The articles and opinion pieces found in this issue of the APS Forum on Education Newsletter are not peer refereed and represent solely the views of the authors and not necessarily the views of the APS.