APS News

June 2013 (Volume 22, Number 6)

Still Time to Vote in APS Society-wide Election

Homer Neal

Homer A. Neal


Stewart Smith

Stewart Smith

Beverly Berger

Beverly Berger

Patricia McBride

Patricia McBride


Dolores Bozovic

Dolores Bozovic

Nadya Mason

Nadya Mason

Kiyoshi Ueda

Kiyoshi Ueda

Mu Wang

Mu Wang
The APS Society-wide election is now in full swing, running until the end of June. Every APS member should have received an email notice with instructions on how to vote online. Below are capsule biographies of the candidates for the various positions. The person elected as vice-President will join the APS Presidential Line, serving next year as vice-President, then as President-elect, President, and past-President over a four-year cycle.

More complete information about the election, including expanded candidate biographies and statements, can be found on the APS General Election web page. 


Vice-President
Homer A. Neal is the Interim President Emeritus and Vice President for Research Emeritus at the University of Michigan. From 1987 to 1993 he was Chair of the University of Michigan Physics Department. He served as Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost at Stony Brook (1981-86) and Dean for Research and Graduate Development at Indiana University (1976-81).

Neal was the principal originator of both the D0 and ATLAS groups at the University of Michigan. Neal has served as Regent of the Smithsonian Institution. His service on numerous advisory committees and directorships include: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, MIT Visiting Committee on Sponsored Research, Board of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Argonne National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and Fermilab. He is currently the PI for the Michigan-CERN REU Program allowing US students to spend a summer of research at CERN.

He is a member of the Board of the Ford Motor Company and currently chairs its Committee on Sustainability. He is a Director of the Lounsbery Foundation and is currently a member of the Council for the Smithsonian Museum of African American History on the Mall, and has served as a member of the NRC Board on Physics and Astronomy. He served as a member of the APS Panel on Public Affairs.

Stewart Smith is a particle physicist whose major research interest is the BaBar experiment at SLAC. As Spokesperson (2000-02) and Technical Coordinator (1999) he had central roles in BaBar’s 2001 discovery of CP-violating asymmetries in B meson processes. For these achievements he shared the APS Panofsky Prize in 2011. Previously, Smith carried out experiments at the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY), Fermilab, and at the Brookhaven AGS.

Smith received BA and MSc degrees from the University of British Columbia and his PhD degree from Princeton University in 1966. After postdoctoral work at DESY, he joined the Princeton faculty in 1967, chairing the Physics department from 1990 to 1998, and spending 2000 to 2002 as Visiting Professor at Stanford University. In 2006, Smith was appointed Princeton’s first Dean for Research, bringing under his umbrella several previously separate administrative departments. Several major campus research centers report to him, as does the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL). This summer Smith will take on a new university position as Vice President for PPPL.

Smith chaired the APS Division of Particles and Fields in 1991 and later served on the Physics Planning Committee. He has worked on numerous advisory committees over the years for the DOE and for National Laboratories in the US, Canada, and at CERN.

Chair-Elect, Nominating Committee
Beverly K. Berger retired from the US National Science Foundation where she was Program Director for Gravitational Physics from late 2001 through 2011. Previously, she had spent 24 years as a faculty member at Oakland University (Michigan). Her research field is theoretical gravitational physics with recent emphasis on singularities and other properties of cosmological spacetimes.

In 1995, she founded and was the first Chair of the APS Topical Group in Gravitation (GGR). She was elected again to the Executive Committee as vice-Chair in 2012. She was a member of the APS Council and chaired the Committee on the Status of Women in Physics, the Publication Oversight Committee, and the selection committees for the Aneesur Rahman Prize for Computational Physics and the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics.

She is currently the secretary of the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation, a member of the Editorial Board of Reports on Progress in Physics, a member of the International Scientific Advisory Board (Fachbeirat) for the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam, a member of the External Advisory Board for the College of Sciences of Rochester Institute of Technology, and a member and ombudsperson of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration.

Patricia McBride is a Senior Scientist and Director of the CMS Center at Fermilab and a collaborator on the CMS experiment at CERN.

She has been a member of the scientific staff at Fermilab for nearly 20 years. She was a member of the scientific staff at the SSC Laboratory in Texas before joining Fermilab. In 1995, she was awarded an NSF Visiting Professorship for Women to spend a year teaching at Princeton University.

Her main research interests are in the areas of experimental particle physics, scientific computing and instrumentation. She was the Deputy Head of the Fermilab Computing Division and served as the deputy computing coordinator for the CMS experiment at CERN during the commissioning and startup phase of the experiment.

She was elected Chair of the APS Division of Particles and Fields (DPF) and serves as a member of the APS Physics Policy Committee.

She served as the Chair of the Commission on Particles and Fields (C11) of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) and was a Vice-President of the IUPAP Executive Council. She is currently the Chair of the US Liaison Committee for IUPAP.

She has served as a member of various committees and advisory groups.


General Councilor

Dolores Bozovic received her PhD in Physics in 2001 from Harvard University, on electron transport in carbon nanotubes. She switched fields for her postdoctoral training, joining the Sensory Neuroscience Laboratory at Rockefeller University on a HHMI fellowship. From 2005 to the present, she was Assistant and then Associate Professor at the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the California NanoSystems Institute, at University of California Los Angeles.

The Bozovic lab focuses on problems at the interface between physics and auditory neuroscience. Her laboratory is interdisciplinary in nature, with experimental and theoretical tools from different fields integrated to address the open questions. As a teacher, she has focused on incorporating instrument-building with biophysical measurements, and has received teaching awards. She has been a mentor for a number of undergraduate research programs for underrepresented minorities, as well as a research mentor for Marlborough School, a mid- and high-school for young women.

Nadya Mason is an associate professor of physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a principal investigator at the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory.

Her research focuses on the electronic properties of low-dimensional materials and the unique behavior they exhibit due to confinement, strong electron interactions, and material structure. Mason is an advocate for diversity in physics; she has actively engaged and mentored women and underrepresented minority graduate, undergraduate, and high-school students. She chairs the Physics Diversity Committee at Illinois (2011–) and is a current member of the APS Committee on Minorities (2013–2016). She also served as co-organizer of the condensed matter sessions of the National Conference of Black and Hispanic Physicists (2007–2011).

Mason participated in the College of Engineering Ad-Hoc Leadership Committee (2012), co-organized an Aspen Winter Conference (2012), and chaired the Facilities Committee at the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory (2011–).

International Councilor
Kiyoshi Ueda is a professor at Tohoku University. He was also a visiting scientist at University of Maryland (1985-87), an invited senior scientist at Daresbury Laboratory in the UK (1992-1993), and an invited professor of Université Paris Sud in France (1998). He has also occasionally played the role of an opponent for the PhD thesis in some universities abroad, such as Uppsala University in Sweden and Turku University in Finland.

His research centers on photoionization and photofragmentation of atoms, molecules, and clusters by synchrotron radiation, femtosecond lasers, and short-wavelength free-electron lasers (FELs).

In the last decade, he has organized a series of international conferences and workshops and also served as an international advisory board member and/or a program committee member for many international conferences. He served also on a program/proposal review panel for FEL facilities and as an advisory and/or review board for relevant facilities. He also serves on the editorial board for J. Phys. B: At. Mol. Opt. Phys.

Mu Wang is the Cheung-Kong professor in condensed matter physics and the Director of the National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures at Nanjing University (NJU), China.

As an experimental physicist, Mu’s research interests focus on the fundamentals of interfacial growth and the optical properties of microstructured materials.

Mu has been the member of the Standing Committee, the Council of Chinese Physical Society since 2004, and a member of the Commission on Structure and Dynamics of Condensed Matter (C10) of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) since 2011. He is an APS Fellow, and also a Fellow of the UK Institute of Physics.

As the Director of the Laboratory, he endeavors actively to promote exchanges and cooperation between different countries with diverse cultural backgrounds, exemplified by the exchange program he helped establish between Johns Hopkins University and NJU and the “dual-degree” program between NJU and Louisiana State University.

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Editor: Alan Chodos
Staff Science Writer: Michael Lucibella

June 2013 (Volume 22, Number 6)

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Articles in this Issue
APS Award Recipient Runs Boston Marathon; Finishes Shortly Before Tragedy Strikes
APS Members Are Asked to Comment On Updated Education Statement
Dark Matter Comes and Goes at April Meeting
Physicists Ready to Add Their BRAIN Power
Meetings Impacted as Travel Cuts Take Effect
Chip-scale Accelerators Verge on Breakthrough
Supernova Data Hide in Ancient Bacterial Remains
Still Time to Vote in APS Society-wide Election
Letters to the Editor
The Back Page
Members in the Media
This Month in Physics History
Washington Dispatch
International News
APS Committee on International Freedom of Scientists
Education Corner