APS-IDEA committee newsletter

Physics Department - University of Texas at Austin

Posted April 30 2021

This is your APS-IDEA Committee with your last newsletter of the 2020-2021 academic year.


Updates:

  • If you were not able to make our town hall meeting, where we discussed a new outreach course for graduate students, our department’s application to become an APS Bridge Program Partnership Institution, and the physics GRE requirement.

  • We are still recruiting new undergraduate and graduate student members to serve on the APS-IDEA Committee. It's not a major time commitment and will allow you to meet other students, faculty, and staff. Please respond to this email if you're interested.

  • We’re putting together a small team to develop a climate survey for the department (inspiration from UC Davis here). If you are interested in joining the team, please respond to this email. Work on the survey will begin over the summer.


Other things:

  • A presentation on “supporting mental health and well-being of STEMM graduate students”

  • A recorded webinar on how to diversify the graduate student pipeline

  • An article on how junior scientists can “land a seat at the leadership table

  • A conference on tech and racial equity


As always, please reach out with any questions or concerns. Have a nice summer!


Best,

Your APS-IDEA Committee



Posted 2020

Dear Physics Community,

This semester, our department joined the APS Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity Alliance. The goal of this

alliance, which includes dozens of universities around the country, is to help institutions identify and implement ways to make their departments more welcoming to all who work there. Our APS-IDEA committee includes faculty, staff, postdoc, graduate students, and undergraduate students (membership listed below).

As part of our effort to build community in our department, we will be sending monthly newsletters to upate you on our actions, advertise events, share resources, and solicit feedback. Our first newsletter will be coming out in November. For now, we just wanted to introduce ourselves and advertise

Black in Physics Week, which is happening through Saturday.

Talk to you soon!

Sincerely,

Your APS-IDEA committee:

Pranshu Adhikari, José Alvarado, Elena Caceres, Dale Campbell, Holland Frieling, Suzanne Jacobs, Michael Marder, Christina Markert, Richard Matzner, Phillip Morrison, Peter Onyisi, Virginia Oviedo, Sonia Paban, Rafael Salazar, Deirdre Shoemaker, Deepa Thomas, Deepesh Verma