APS Chapters hope to support its members with the tools to succeed as 21st century professionals, by facilitating an inclusive and equitable community structure, within which individuals will have opportunities to engage in professional development, networking, and advocacy/policy issues, etc.

As Vice-chair of the APS Chapter at the University of Michigan I am excited to bring events to the local community that serve this purpose. Within our first six months, we have already organized a LinkedIn Workshop, a Science Communication Workshop in Partnership with the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, and a Panel on PostDoc applications together with the APS Chapters at the University of Texas, Arlington, and the University of Houston.

Teaching introductory physics and life sciences lab to engineering and pre-med students is often seen as a dull but necessary task by many first-year physics students.

However, I discovered for myself that much joy can be found in getting students excited about the physical phenomena surrounding us in our everyday life. Nothing is as rewarding as seeing the delighted look on a student's face who thought they absolute hated physics when they understand a physical phenomenon affecting their everyday life. (My mantra is: People don't hate physics, or science in general, they just tend to dislike their science teacher.) As a tutor, I helped improve the current lab structure, taught the labs to students, and graded their lab reports. I am particularly proud of actively helping to "virtualize" the labs when the COVID 19 outbreak first hit in March by recording explanatory videos about the experiments.

Intercultural coexistence is for me more than a given gift: It is a condition to be preserved. Through my extended stays in France (2010), Chile (2016), and the United States of America (2018-current) I bring a lot of intercultural experience to the table. My engagement in the twin city booster club in my hometown after my stay abroad in France was motivated by sheer fascination: less than two decades after World War II, when the exchange between citizens from my German hometown and its French twin city was first initiated, how could Germans and French alike could leave their past behind them, overcome their differences, and learn from each other? This is the story of my life: teaching and learning from each other. Keeping the inherent curiosity we have for other people, for other cultures. I try to educate about the experiences I have made and listen to others about their experiences, which is why I engage in the yearly Meet-A-German program from the German American Fulbright Commission, which tries to bring the two countries, important allies, closer together.

As an optics researcher, nothing should be more enjoyable than actually helping to teach an optics course. So when my research advisor taught the introductory optics course, I didn't hesitate for a second, and I applied for a tutoring job.

Some of my responsibilities were to grade the homework assignments, lead discussion sections, and help the professor develop the homework assignments while overall helping the lecture progress by engaging with students and realizing where their difficulties with the material were. It was an exciting opportunity that not only allowed me share my knowledge about optics but actually helped me deepen and further my understanding of it by needing to teach and explain it.

Being a spokesperson of the regional group of the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes (German Academic Scholarship Foundation) from 2015-2018 allowed me to have a direct impact on the local community and realize my visions for the mission of this scholarship.

Among other things, we organized colloquia on topics reaching from science to politics, hosted social hours and welcome weekends for old and new scholarship recipients, organized charity concerts for a local refugee camp, and reached out to prospective scholarship recipients to inform them about the possibilities and chances this scholarship offers.

As an active member of the Young German Physical Society (jDPG) from 2014-2018, as well as a spokesperson from 2016-2017, I helped shape the physics outreach at the University of Göttingen and the region beyond.

From going into high schools to share our passion for physics to organizing colloquia and science slams, we tried our best to fascinate other people about physics. We also understood our mission as providing useful insights to prospective and current physics students at the university and supported them along their paths through high school and college.