Editorial – STEM education is key
It’s now two months since I accepted the Presidency of the German Physical Society, the DPG: a great honour for any German physicist, but also a great responsibility. With over 60,000 members, the DPG is the largest society devoted to physics in the world. It binds itself and its members to advocate for freedom, tolerance, truth and dignity in science, and to be conscious of the fact that those of us working in science have a particularly important role in society, being to a large extent responsible for the development of society. To me, that means that organisations like the DPG, and indeed the European Physical Society, need to look very closely at education as the basis to both the progress of science and of society.
Editorial – All artists must go where the people are
Every year many PhD graduates in STEM fields around Europe enter the academic market hoping to pursue a scientific career that finally leads to a secure permanent position. However, most of them will not make it. The reality is that there are not many of those positions and every step of a research career leads to an even narrower bottleneck. During the past years, all around Europe, the employment security of researchers is threatened by cuts in national research budgets as well as an unfair standardised recruitment system based on publications that often favours quantity over quality. The young researchers become casualties of the academic system and I am one of those victims …
