Meeting Briefs
APS New England Section, March 30-31, 2001, Middlebury, Vermont
The APS New England Section held its annual spring meeting at Middlebury College in Vermont in March, in conjunction with the corresponding geographical section of the American Association of Physics Teachers. Friday afternoon's program centered on the theme of chaos, complexity and self-organization, and featured talks on nonlinear dynamics and mixing dynamical systems. Thomas Moore of Pomona College was the keynote speaker at the banquet later that evening, summarizing lessons he learned about reforming the introductory calculus-based physics course at Pomona. In addition to assorted topics in general physics, Saturday morning's program focused on chaos, complexity and self-organization in the high school and college classroom. In addition, two general interest invited talks were given outlined six ideas that helped shape physics, and applied chaos to ship dynamics and wave propagation.
APS New York Section, April 6-7, 2001, Yorktown Heights, New York
The APS New York Section held its annual spring meeting at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, organized around the theme of the physics of self-organized nanostructures, including nanocrystals, nanowires and nanoporous templates. Each of the three half-day sessions — two on Friday and one on Saturday morning — consisted of an introductory tutorial followed by a series of topical presentations by such luminaries in the field as Lynn Boatner of Oak Ridge National Laboratory; IBM's own Frances Ross; Leonid Tsybeskov of the University of Rochester; and Alexei Ekimov of Nanocrystal Technology. Louis Brus of Columbia University was Friday evening's banquet speaker, summarizing current trends in nanostructured materials physics.
APS Ohio Section, April 20-21, 2001, Kent, Ohio
The APS Ohio Section held its annual spring meeting in April at Kent State University. Friday afternoon's session featured talks on membrane protein structure, solid state NMR, and the dynamics of heme proteins determined by synchrotron Mössbauer scattering, followed by a tour of the university's Liquid Crystal Institute. Thomas Weber, director of NSF's Division of Materials Research, gave a public presentation following the evening banquet, outlining NSF initiatives in information technology research, nanoscale science and engineering, and biocomplexity in the environment. Saturday morning featured two additional invited lectures on the collapse mechanism in lung surfactant systems, and scanning near-field infrared microscopy of single living cells.
