The American Physical Society comes to Europe
The American Physical Society [APS] held its Executive Board Retreat at Chicheley Hall (Buckinghamshire, UK), home of the Kavli Royal Society International Centre. This is the first time in history that APS has held its Executive Board Retreat in Europe. On Monday 17 June, a special international session was organized with representatives of European Societies, namely from the Institute of Physics [IoP], the German Physical Society [DPG] and the European Physical Society [EPS], with the goal to “better understand each others’ interests and discuss new strategies for expanding APS collaboration with European partners”, as stated by APS President Michael Turner.
Sir Peter Knight (IoP), Bernhard Nunner (DPG), in video conference, Luisa Cifarelli (EPS) and Michael Turner (APS) gave the APS Executive Board members an overview of their respective organizations. Then a lively Panel Discussion on “Perspectives on potential areas of cooperation”, moderated by Amy Flatten, APS Director of International Affairs, enabled each representative to identify their ideas and/or priorities for possible initiatives.
“It is our hope that the session will conclude by identifying some new ideas for collaboration and joint activities that we can refine and pursue over the following years” was President Turner’s wish. This was indeed the case and according to the official summary by Amy Flatten of the conclusions of this fruitful meeting, some of the ideas considered by the participants included joint policy statements, joint studies, connecting young physicists, communicating the importance of physics to policy-makers and the public, and workshops on teaching innovations.
