APS Meetings Feature Beller, Marshak Lecturers

This year, APS will sponsor the travel of three distinguished physicists from around the world to speak at the March and “April” meetings through its named lectureship grants. Each lectureship recipient was chosen by the APS Committee on International Scientific Affairs after being nominated by different APS units.

The recipient of the Marshak Lectureship, Mukhles Sowwan of Al-Quds University in the Palestinian Authority, will speak at this year’s April Meeting about the formation of the Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East. Recipients of the Beller Lectureship, Joseph Klafter of Tel-Aviv University in Israel and Nathalie Picqué of the Laboratoire de Photophysique Moléculaire in France will speak at the March Meeting about Lévy flights and broadband spectroscopy with laser frequency combs respectively.

Sowwan’s research specializes in nanotechnology, especially in the area of biophysics. His talk, in session Q3 on Monday, February 15, will describe how the SESAME laboratory is a unique multidisciplinary center for particle physics in the Middle East. Modeled after CERN, its member countries includes countries that are often political adversaries, such as Bahrain, Cyprus, Egypt, Iran, Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Jordan, Pakistan and Turkey. He was nominated by the Forum on International Physics.

Klafter is one of the earliest pioneers and biggest contributors to the statistical physics of Lévy flights, a category of random walk. In session A4 on Monday, March 15, he will present his research developing ways to better model human mobility in complex environments. His work has many applications in epidemic modeling, city planning, and statistical physics. He was nominated by the Topical Group on Statistical and Nonlinear Physics.

Picqué will speak as part of the March Meeting’s focus session on New Trends in Spectroscopy in session Q27 on Wednesday, March 17. She has done much work developing ways to use laser frequency combs in Fourier Transform spectroscopy, and will speak about their uses for broadband spectroscopy in real-time. She was nominated by the Division of Chemical Physics.

The Beller lectureship was first established by Esther Hoffman Beller in 1994 to bring notable physicists from abroad to speak at APS meetings. The Marshak Lectureship was first established in 1996 by Ruth Marshak in memory of her late husband and former APS president Robert Marshak to bring physicists to the APS meetings from developing nations and the Eastern Bloc.