American Physical Society Partners In $3 Million National Program To Increase Women Physics Majors

COLLEGE PARK, MD, May 17, 2017 - Armed with a $3 million National Science Foundation grant, researchers are heading back to high school to encourage more women to pursue careers in physics.

Zahra Hazari, an associate professor of physics education in the STEM Transformation Institute and Department of Teaching & Learning at Florida International University, will lead a team of researchers from FIU who are partnering with Texas A&M University — Commerce, the American Physical Society (APS) and the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT). They will unite 16,000 high school physics teachers behind a movement — a movement where each physics teacher will recruit at least one female student to pursue a physics major in college.

"We could accomplish something that’s never been done in history,” Hazari said. “We could change the face of physics in the United States."

Although about half of the students in high school physics courses are women, their numbers drop off radically by the time they go to college. "Women continue to be stuck at only twenty percent representation in physics at the undergraduate level," said APS Chief Executive Officer Kate Kirby, "and through this project we now have a chance to dramatically alter that statistic and build a stronger scientific enterprise."

The first phase of the project, slated to start with the new school year in August, will involve a small group of master teachers from urban, suburban and rural schools who will pilot the program. They will ensure that the lessons and best practices such as recognizing female students who solve difficult problems or having students request help from successful women in their physics classrooms can be adapted for students throughout the country.

By 2018, the campaign will expand to twenty-four teachers. If all goes as planned, there will be a nationwide rollout by 2019 with a targeted goal of reaching 16,000 physics educators — or about sixty percent of all high school physics teachers.

If only one-third of the nation’s high school physics teachers recruited at least one female student to pursue a physics major, the nation’s gender gap in STEM careers could be sharply alleviated, Hazari said.

"We could achieve the largest increase of women in physics in any decade in history," Hazari said. "It's very exciting to encourage women to participate in physics when they might not have considered it before and they may be perfect, they might have a love for physics they never knew existed."

At the conclusion of the project in 2020, researchers will have more data to determine how their methods might be applied to other STEM fields, including engineering, where women traditionally have been underrepresented.

Press inquiries should be directed to: James Riordon, APS, riordon@aps.org, (301) 209-3238

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The American Physical Society is a nonprofit membership organization working to advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics through its outstanding research journals, scientific meetings, and education, outreach, advocacy, and international activities. APS represents more than 50,000 members, including physicists in academia, national laboratories, and industry in the United States and throughout the world.

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Florida International University is classified by Carnegie as a "R1: Doctoral Universities - Highest Research Activity" and recognized as a Carnegie Community Engaged university. It is a public research university with colleges and schools that offers bachelor's, master's and doctoral programs in fields such as business, engineering, computer science, international relations, architecture, law and medicine. As one of South Florida's anchor institutions, FIU contributes almost $9 billion each year to the local economy and is ranked second in Florida in Forbes Magazine's "America’s Best Employers" list. FIU graduates are consistently among the highest paid college graduates in Florida and are among the leaders of public and private organizations throughout South Florida. FIU is Worlds Ahead in finding solutions to the most challenging problems of our time. FIU emphasizes research as a major component of its mission with multiple state-of-the-art research facilities including the Wall of Wind Research and Testing Facility, FIU's Medina Aquarius Program and the Advanced Materials Engineering Research Institute. FIU has awarded more than 220,000 degrees and enrolls more than 54,000 students in two campuses and centers including FIU Downtown on Brickell, FIU@I-75, the Miami Beach Urban Studios, and Tianjin, China. FIU also supports artistic and cultural engagement through its three museums: Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, the Wolfsonian-FIU, and the Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU. FIU is a member of Conference USA and more than 400 student-athletes participating in 18 sports. Visit FIU for more information.