Texas-Sized APS March Meeting in San Antonio

The APS March Meeting is heading to the Alamo in 2015. It will take place in the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center in San Antonio, Texas from March 2 through 6. It is the largest yearly physics meeting in the United States and will feature about 110 invited sessions, more than 600 contributed sessions, and a total of more than 8,500 papers presented. Organizers are expecting almost 10,000 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; 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 theme will be “Frontiers of Light,” in conjunction with the International Year of Light in 2015 and the 2014 Nobel prizes awarded for advances in light and optics. Physics laureate Shuji Nakamura of the University of California, Santa Barbara will speak about the creation of the blue LED. Chemistry laureate W. E. Moerner of Stanford University will discuss the visualization of single molecules in biological systems.

Before the meeting, the Division of Polymer Physics will hold its popular annual short courses on recent advances in this field. These two-day sessions run from Saturday afternoon to Sunday evening and will focus on glasses. Also on the Sunday before the meeting there are five tutorials on a range of topics. The tutorials are aimed at graduate students, postdocs, university faculty, and industrial researchers who want to be brought up to speed on a particular field. There will be three tutorials in the morning, followed by a different two in the afternoon. The subjects are quantum annealing, the physics of climate change, iridates, quantum gasses for simulation, and resources for computational materials science.

The APS prize and award ceremonial session will be held late on Monday afternoon, honoring the outstanding contributions of researchers to their fields. This will be followed by an opening reception for all participants.

There will be a variety of events for students attending the meeting. On Monday evening, students are invited to attend a special welcome reception and career panel highlighting non-academic and non-Ph.D. career paths. There will also be a Tuesday evening reception where awards will be passed out followed by a dance party. The graduate school fair will be open on Monday and Tuesday for undergraduates looking to learn more about continuing their education. 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 their choice of topic.

The Committee on Minorities, in conjunction with the Committee on the Status of Women in Physics and the Ad Hoc Committee on LGBT Issues, will host a Diversity Networking Reception. Open to everyone, the reception will be a chance for physicists who want to learn about APS diversity efforts to meet one another and network.

The Forum on Industrial and Applied Physics (FIAP) is hosting a number of events at the meeting. Industry Day, scheduled for Wednesday, will feature a number of scientific sessions dedicated to industrial physics on topics important for manufacturing. The Job Expo will run from Monday through Thursday. On Thursday, FIAP will be hosting a special forum on entrepreneurship in physics to help physicists prepare for careers in private sector. The Sunday before the meeting, science career coach Peter Fisk will host a workshop for researchers to help advance their careers.

The exhibit hall will run from March 2 through 5 and will feature more than 100 exhibitors.  And, as at past meetings, the APS Contact Congress booth will be set up for attendees to help them reach their members of Congress to express their concerns about science funding.

For more, see the APS March Meeting 2015 website.