Laura Greene Elected Vice President of APS for 2015

The APS general election has ended and the results are in: Laura Greene of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has been elected Vice President. She will serve one year as Vice President and then one year as President-Elect before serving as President of the Society in 2017.

Greene, a condensed matter physicist, has served on a number of APS boards and committees, including the Executive Board, Council, the Committee on Committees, the Nominating Committee, the Fellowship Committee and several prize committees; also, she helped found the APS Committee on Informing the Public and the Forum on Outreach and Engaging the Public. She is currently chair of the Division of Materials Physics. She has also served on numerous other governing bodies, including the Sloan Fellowship Selection Committee for Physics, the Condensed Matter Physics Grant Selection Committee of the Natural Sciences, and the Engineering Research Council of Canada. Most recently, she was elected to the board of directors of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In her candidate statement, Greene said: “Sustained and increased funding for fundamental and applied research can be engendered by public engagement: As politicians vote supporting their constituents, APS must take a leadership role in promoting that engagement. Our technological challenges for the 21st century exist on a global scale, and enhancing our partnerships with industry and international exchanges will facilitate our tapping into vast, undiscovered, human resources.”

Current President-Elect Samuel Aronson of Brookhaven National Laboratory will move up and assume the presidency in January 2015, when current President Malcolm Beasley of Stanford University steps down. At the same time, Homer Neal from the University of Michigan will advance from Vice President to President-Elect.

Paul Chaikin of New York University was elected as the Chair-Elect of the Nominating Committee. He is a condensed matter experimentalist and helped found NYU’s Center for Soft Matter Research. He has also served on several APS prize and nominating committees and recently chaired the APS Forum on Outreach and Engaging the Public. In his candidate statement, Chaikin said: “The goals of the APS should be to foster awareness in government, business and society as a whole of the contributions that have and will be made by scientific investigation and discovery, so that both the most daring and fundamental as well as the most useful research will be supported. Further, we should aim to lift the level of analytic and scientific reasoning in the country and its policy makers.”

Eliezer Rabinovici, a quantum field theory and string theory researcher from Hebrew University in Jerusalem, was elected to be an International Councilor. He is the Israeli scientific delegate to the CERN council and has worked for twenty years to help build the SESAME synchrotron light source in Jordan. He is also a member of the Scientific Council of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, located in Russia, and a former member of the High Energy Physics Board of the European Physical Society. In his candidate statement, Rabinovici said: “Science in general and physics in particular has made significant progress by successfully combining the individual spirit with global collective efforts.... The acquiring of new knowledge and the satisfying of our human curiosity requires both big science and small science. It requires global cooperation while understanding and respecting our national and personal identities.”

Gail McLaughlin, a theoretical nuclear physicist at North Carolina State University, was elected to be a General Councilor. She is chair of the Advisory Committee for the Institute for Nuclear Theory, located at the University of Washington in Seattle. She has also served on the APS Program Committee, the Executive Committee and on the Fellowship Committee of the Division of Nuclear Physics and the Nominating Committee for the Division of Astrophysics. In her candidate statement, McLaughlin said: “Support for basic sciences is facing significant challenges, and physicists need to find ways to effectively communicate the excitement of doing science, and the benefits of basic science to the economic well-being of the nation. We have to convey this message to both the public at large, and to policy makers in the federal and state governments.”