March Meeting Heads for Crab Country

The APS March Meeting is coming to the Baltimore Convention Center from March 18 through 22. It is the largest yearly physics meeting in the United States and will feature 112 invited sessions, more than 500 contributed sessions and a total of more than 8,000 papers presented. Organizers are expecting at least 8,500 people to attend. The meeting highlights the latest research from the APS Divisions of Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics; Biological Physics; Chemical Physics; Computational Physics; Condensed Matter Physics; Fluid Dynamics; Materials Physics; Physics of Beams; and Polymer Physics, as well as the topical groups on Statistical and Nonlinear Physics, Magnetism and its Applications, and Quantum Information.

This year’s Kavli Foundation Special Session will take place on Wednesday. Titled “Forefront Physics for Real World Problems: Energy, Climate, and the Environment,” it will focus on the physics of issues facing the planet, such as climate modeling, energy generation and storage.

Thursday’s Nobel Prize session will feature at least one, and possibly both of this year’s Prize winners, David Wineland and Serge Haroche.

The new Topical Group on the Physics of Climate will hold its first session at this year's March Meeting, as will the new Forum on Outreach and Engaging the Public. In addition, members of newest APS section, the Mid-Atlantic Section, will be holding a welcome reception on Wednesday to introduce themselves to meeting attendees.

Several events are aimed at students attending the meeting. A special industrial physics outreach session is planned to give students a chance to see what jobs might be available in industry. Graduate students can sign up for Lunch with the Experts, where they can enjoy a boxed lunch while having an informal, freewheeling discussion with an expert on any topic that interests them. A reception for students is planned for Wednesday evening, along with the student job fair and a graduate school fair.

The annual PhysTEC conference will be held in conjunction with the March Meeting. From March 16 through 17 at the nearby Sheraton Inner Harbor Hotel, teachers from kindergarten through grade 12 will gather for a series of workshops about mentoring, recruitment, course reforms and assessment. The PhysTEC conference this year is also collaborating with the American Chemical Society to feature sessions aimed at chemistry teachers.

The APS prize ceremony will be held on Monday evening honoring researcher’s contributions to their fields.  

Before the start of the meeting, DPOLY will hold a two-day short course titled “Membranes for Clean Energy and Water” about the physics of polymers that can filter out different impurities. The course will highlight the recent theoretical and experimental results in the field in both academia and industry.

Also on Sunday, the National Science Foundation is sponsoring a professional skills workshop for women postdocs and more senior women physicists. The workshop focuses on negotiation, communication and leadership, with the goal of producing more women leaders in the field.

Tutorials on some of the most exciting fields in physics will also be held on Sunday. Aimed especially at graduate students and postdocs, the tutorials are designed to give any researcher an introduction to the fundamentals of the field. The tutorials will cover topics in biophysics, quantum information, graphene, jamming and metamaterials.

The exhibition hall this year will run from Tuesday through Thursday.

As always, the APS Contact Congress booth, attendees are invited at any time to send a letter to their members of Congress about the importance of federal research funding.