Welcome to the 2019 Fall Meeting
Summary
The 2019 Fall Meeting of the Far West Section of the American Physical Society took place on November 1 and 2 at Stanford University with support from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, the Physics Department and the Department of Applied Phyiscs at Stanford. The program featured plenary talks, contributed poster and oral presentations as well as a career workshop. As always, we enjoyed a dinner together on the first evening and rounded out the day with an after-dinner presentation, which was presented by Patricia Burchat (Stanford University). The program, details about the career workshop and program information is attached below. Also, if you wish to provide feedback for the meeting you may do so using the form provided. We also include a few pictures fromt the event.
One of the main highlights of these meetings are the talks and posters presented by students from the section. As every year, the committee came together after the conference and selected the best presnentations in differetn categories. The winners are listed here, in some cases a prize was shared between two presenters. Congratulations to everyone ! YOu will receive a notification from us soon with a certificate. We will also list this years winner on the section webpage https://www.aps.org/units/cal/.
2019 Post-Doctoral Awards
Charles Kittel Award for Best Theoretical Research
First place: Arnold JTM Mathijssen (Stanford University)
Luis Alvarez Award for Best Experimental Research
First place: Omar Moreno (SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory)
2019 Graduate Student Awards
Kennedy Reed Award for Best Theoretical Research by a Graduate Student
First place: Megan Barry (CSU Long Beach)
Second place: Amandeep Gill (UN Reno)
Jaeyeong Lee (CSU Fresno)
Margaret Burbidge Award for Best Experimental Research by a Graduate Student
First place: Nicholas Dale (LBNL)
Second place: Maria Simanovskaia (UC Berkeley)
Samantha Lewis (UC Berkeley)
2019 Undergraduate Student Awards
Steven Chu Award for Best Research by an Undergraduate Student
First place: Kelly Fradet (Santa Clara University)
Heather Jackson (UC Berkeley)
Helen Quinn Award for Education or Undergraduate Research Theory
First place: Matthew Fox (Harvey Mudd College)
Spenser Talkington (UC Los Angeles)
2019 Poster Prizes
The SPS Poster Prize
Shraddha Anand (Stanford University)
Yoana Guzman (CSU Chico)
2019 High School Prizes
Best Poster Presentation by A High School Student
Emily Zhou, The Harker School San Jose
Arjun Padiyar, Irvington High School Fremont
William Huang, Lynbrook High School San Jose
A BIG THANKS everyone for coming and making this a succesful and enjoyable meeting. We hope to see many of you next year at the University of Hawaii in Manoa between October 8-10.
The Executive Committee of the Far West Section.
Clockwise from bottom left to top right:
Parallel sessions on Saturday took place in the Science Teaching and Learning Center and were very well attended.
A glimpse at the poster session that started us off on Friday morning, in the Huang Engineering Center. In addtion to graduate and undergraduate students we were joined by a group of high school students from the area
Plenary talks on Friday were presented in Campbell Recital Hall. Prof. William Chueh from the Department for Materials Science introduces his group at Stanford University.
Location and Parking Information
The meeting will take place on the campus of Stanford University. For your convenience we include a map below.
We will start our program on Friday morning at the Huang Engineering Center (yellow arrow). For those of you who arrive by car there will be parking reserved in the Via Ortega Garage nearby (to the left on the map) . Spaces 101-140 on the first floor of the Via Ortega garage are reserved for us and there will be signs indicating that they are reserved for the "APS Far West Section" meeting. However, to avoid being ticketed and to make sure that only participants of the conference using the reserved spaces you need to register your licence plate in advance here:
https://stanford.nupark.com/v2/portal/eventregister/862007f9-2da1-4971-b4e9-7062668a19ee
The poster session will take place in the Foyer, which is in the basement of the HEC building. The Huang Engineering Center features examples how engineering ingenuity has changed the world around us. For this reason it is only fitting that we will place our posters around the first Google server!! After a break and some time to explore campus we will continue the program in the Braun Music Center (green arrow). Stanford has a long tradition in the arts and every summer campus is filled with jazz musicians from all over the world participating in the Jazz Workshops. So you get to experience this side of campus as well.
Parking is for free in most locations on Saturday and you may choose to park in the same location, although the "reserved" signs are not there anymore or in a location closer to the session. The program will take place in the Sapp Science, Teaching and Learning Center (red arrow). A newly renovated facility next to the Chemistry department dedicated to STEM education.
Program
The outline below will give you an idea about the program. Since the conference takes place at a time when classes are being taught, we had to change our typical program layout a little. We will start with a poster session on Friday and have three plenary talks on Friday and one on Saturday. All the contributed talks will be presented on Saturday before and after the career workshop. Back by popular demand the career workshop will feature a presentation by Peter Fiske, like last year, as well as a panel featuring scientists working in academia, industry and other fields.
The detailed program is posted on the APS webpage here: http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/FWS19/Content/3818. If you submitted an abstract and would like to know when your talk is scheduled you can look it up there.
Presentation Guidelines
The conference will feature invited talks, contributed talks and poster presentations.
Oral presentations:
Invited talks will be 45 minutes long, including a 5 minute period for questions. We assume that invited speakers will bring their own laptop to connect to the projector. Common adapters will be available, the standard connection is HDMI. Please make sure that your presentation works before the session starts.
Contributed talks are 12 minutes long, including 2 minutes for questions. The rooms STLC 105/114/115 and 118 will be equipped with Apple Macbooks that are connected to the projector. You will be able to upload your presentation (Powerpoint, Keynote or PDF) to the laptop before the session starts. We would like to ask presenters as well as session chairs to be in the room 15 minutes before the start of the session to upload and check their presentations.
Poster presentations:
We will provide poster boards and push pins. The maximum poster size is 48"x48". The best poster by graduates and undergraduates will receive a prize, please be at your poster during the entire session to answer questions.
Career Workshop
A career workshop has become am integral part of the annual event calendar of the Far West Section. This year we decided to combine it with our annual meeting because of the proximity, instead of having it in teh BAy Area in early summer. We are grateful for the support of the APS career development group https://www.aps.org/careers/index.cfm and our partners at Insight https://www.insightdatascience.com. Both provided valuable resources that enabled us to organize this workshop. Also, both of these organizations provide very informative resources for you on their websites, so it is definitely worth it to check them out.
The career workshop will feature two parts. The first part is a 90 minute interactive presentation by Peter Fiske (LBNL). Peter is a great speaker and has presented at scientific career workshops for many years with great success. You can read more about him here:
The second part of the career workshop will consist of a classic career panel, moderated by Patricia Burchat (Stanford). The panelists and their backgound are listed in the following. We also added their LinkedIn profile for your infromation:
Elaine DiMasi (LinkedIn profile)
Education: BS Physics with Honors in EE, Penn State U 1990; PhD Physics, U Michigan 1996; Project Management Certificate, Stony Brook University Corporate Education Center, 2018
Career history:
Synchrotron Project Beamlines Lead, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, March 2019 - present
Political Candidate & Campaign Manager, 2017-2018
Control Account Manager & Group Leader, Brookhaven National Lab, 2011-2017
Physicist - postdoc through tenured staff - at Brookhaven Nat'l Lab, 1996-2017
George Burkhard (LinkedIn profile)
Education: BS Physics, Yale 2005; PhD Applied Physics, Stanford 2011; Y Combinator 2017
Career history:
CTO Sinovia Technologies, 2011-present
Co-founder/chief technology officer at Sinovia, flexible displays
Jeremy Karnowski (LinkedIn profile)
Education: BS Mathematics & BS Cognitive Science, minors in CS and Biology, Indiana U Bloomington 2006; PhD Candidate in Cognitive Science, UC San Diego 2015
Career history:
VP Product, Insight Data Science, 2015 - present
PhD Candidate, UCSD, 2010-2015
Subject Matter Expert, Department of Veterans Affairs Education Sector, 2009-2010
Math Educator, Peace Corps, 2006 - 2008
Vedika Khemani (LinkedIn profile)
Education: BS Physics, Harvey Mudd College 2010; PhD Physics, Princeton U 2016
Career history:
Assistant Professor of Physics, Stanford, August 2019 - present
Junior Fellow, Harvard University, 2016 - 2019
Pat Burchat, moderator
Education: B Appl. Sci. Eng., Eng Science, U of Toronto 1981; PhD Physics, Stanford 1986
Career history:
Professor, Stanford University, Physics (particle physics; cosmology), 1995 - present
Assistant / Associate Professor, UC Santa Cruz, 1988 - 1995
Postdoc, Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics, 1986 - 1988
Attendance of the career workshop is open to anyone, regardless if you are registered or not. We will provide lunch during the break.
Lodging
Student Lodging: Registration for student lodging is now closed. Please contact the local organizers if you have questions.
Student Travel Award: Students presenting at the conference are eligible for travel awards of up to $100 to cover other travel expenses (if not covered by other sources). Contact Dr. Alla Safronova (alla at physics.unr.edu) about the Student Travel Award.
The student hotel will be the Courtyard Marriott Palo Alto https://www.marriott.com/hotels/travel/paocy-courtyard-palo-alto-los-altos/. Parking at the hotel is included in your stay, however breakfast is not included. The hotel is located approximately 4 miles south from Campus on El Camino Real, one of the main roads through the Peninsula.
For non-student participants we do not offer a special rate, however there are currently (10/23/2019) numerous hotels withing less than 5 miles from campus that offer rooms at a rate of about $140 per night, which is considered affordable. A few examples provided "hotels.com" are listed here:
Comfort Inn, Palo Alto Stanford University ($108 per night)
Crowne Plaza Cabana Palo Alto ($135 per night)
Courtyard Palo Alto/Los Altos ($148 per night)
If you are by car you may also go further north (Redwood City/San Carlos), where there are more hotels within 20 minute driving from campus. Reserved parking on campus will be provided on Friday and parking is for free on Saturday campus wide.
Meeting Poster
The meeting poster is included here. Feel free to download and distribute.
