APS News

August/September 2013 (Volume 22, Number 8)

APS Members Elect Homer Neal to Presidential Line

In Society-wide elections in June, APS members cast their ballots for Homer Neal of the University of Michigan to be the next vice-President. As the newest member of the Presidential Line, Neal will become APS President in 2016.

The members also voted for Kiyoshi Ueda of Tohoku University to be a new International Councilor, Nadya Mason of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to be a General Councilor, and Patricia McBride of Fermilab to be the Chair-elect of the Nominating Committee.

Neal will assume his office in January of next year, succeeding Sam Aronson of Brookhaven National Lab, who will become President-elect. This year's President-elect, Malcolm Beasley of Stanford University, will become President, while current President Michael Turner will remain on the APS Council and Executive Board as past-President.

Neal is currently the interim president emeritus and vice-president for research emeritus at the University of Michigan. He specializes in particle physics, and is a member of the ATLAS collaboration at CERN. He has also served as Regent of the Smithsonian Institution, served on both the National Research Council and the governing board of the National Science Foundation, and is currently a board member of the Ford Motor Company, chairing its committee on sustainability.

"I hope to contribute relevant portions of my life experiences to the continued advancement of the APS as it navigates the difficult times ahead," Neal said. "For several decades I have been actively working on many of the issues that now face the APS, including improving funding for research, addressing the competitive role of the US in science, fostering cross-communication between our sub-disciplines and with other science fields...focusing concern about the state of our national laboratories, addressing the challenges of outreach and science education, encouraging young people to consider careers in physics, helping the public appreciate the enormous contributions physics has made to their quality of life, highlighting the role of high school physics teachers, and many other issues."

Kiyoshi Ueda first arrived at Tohoku University in 1982. His research has been in areas of atomic, molecular, and optical physics. He has helped organize multiple international conferences in his and related fields. He said in his candidate statement that science is becoming more and more borderless, and it's important to foster both international and interdisciplinary collaborations.

"I hope to make a bridge among scientists all over the world and from different fields, believing that sharing different ways of thinking brings us breakthroughs in science," Ueda said.

Nadya Mason is a condensed matter experimentalist who has focused on carbon nanotubes, graphene, topological insulators and nano-scale superconductors. She has been a strong advocate for diversity in the field. She is a member of the APS Committee on Minorities and chairs the Physics Diversity Committee at Illinois.

"The things that are important to me are increasing the pipeline in physics, especially for women and underrepresented minorities," Mason said. "And also just things like making sure that the public, especially policy makers, recognizes the importance of physics."

Patricia McBride has been at Fermilab for nearly 20 years. Her research focus is on the instrumentation of particle physics experiments, and she has been involved in the design of several experiments at Fermilab and CERN. In the past she has served as chair of the Commission on Particles and Fields under International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, and was a vice-president of the IUPAP Executive Council. "It's a job that I take seriously and I understand that it's important for the organization to have strong leadership," McBride said. "I'm a firm believer that these kinds of organizations have to reinvent themselves to stay current."

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Editor: Alan Chodos
Staff Science Writer: Michael Lucibella

August/September 2013 (Volume 22, Number 8)

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Articles in this Issue
APS Members Elect Homer Neal to Presidential Line
APS Set to Launch Applied Physics Journal
Phys Rev X Debuts with Top-Ten “Impact Factor” Ranking
APS to Participate in Multi-Publisher Open Access Research Clearinghouse
Meeting Helps Bridge Programs Interact
Executive Officer Kate Kirby Plans Strategically for 2nd Term
All Five US Physics Olympians Come Home with Medals
Winners Selected in APS Middle-School Science Program
APS Committee Endorses Next Generation Standards
Letters to the Editor
The Back Page
Members in the Media
This Month in Physics History
Washington Dispatch
International News
Zero Gravity: The Lighter Side of Science
Education Corner