APS News

February 2013 (Volume 22, Number 2)

Beller, Marshak Lectures to Enhance March and April Meeting Programs

About the Lectureships

Gray arrow Beller Lectureship
Gray arrow Marshak Lectureship

APS has announced the recipients of the 2013 Beller and Marshak lectureships, who will deliver their talks at this year’s March and April meetings. The APS Committee on International Scientific Affairs selected the recipients from nominations submitted by various APS units.

Rupert Oulton from Imperial College London and Naoto Nagaosa of the University of Tokyo will present two of the Beller Lectures at the March Meeting in Baltimore while Linda Strubbe from the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics will deliver the third at the April Meeting in Denver. Lilia Meza-Montes from the Universidad de Puebla in Mexico will give the Marshak lecture at the March Meeting.

The two endowments bring physicists from around the world to speak at the March and April Meetings. The Beller lectureship was endowed in 1994 by Esther Hoffman Beller and the Marshak lectureship was established by Ruth Marshak in 1996 in honor of her late husband, former APS president Robert Marshak. The recipients of both awards receive travel stipends to attend either the March or April meetings. Recipients have traveled to the United States from as far abroad as India, Israel and France.

During the focus session on Nanostructures and Metamaterials in March, Oulton will speak about his research into nano-lasers.

“The Beller lectureship came as a wonderful surprise to me and I am honored to have been selected. The APS meetings provide a great forum for communicating current results, learning about progress in a wide range of fields in Physics and of course meeting new friends, colleagues and collaborators,” Oulton said. “The Beller lectureship is an excellent advertisement for my research field of nanoscopic lasers, which is relatively new, and I hope it helps highlight my talk against the backdrop of this important physics meeting.”

Also at the March Meeting, Nagaosa will speak at a symposium titled “Stabilization and Dynamics of Magnetic Skyrmions” which is sponsored jointly by the Division of Condensed Matter Physics and the Topical Group on Magnetism.

“This is a great honor, and I am very much encouraged by this award, which will stimulate the further studies on the related topics. Especially, I am now excited about the dynamics of the topological spin textures in magnets, which will be even more exciting in the near future.” Ngaosa said.

Montes will deliver her talk, “Women in Physics: Increasing in number, and what else?” at a session organized by the Forum on International Physics titled “Recent Advances in Condensed Matter in Latin America.”

“It will give support to the work that I and some other physicists in Latin America are doing to develop science in our region. It will also give visibility to female physicists, help to attract attention of our male colleagues to gender issues, and even in the long term to convince administrators in universities, agencies and government to develop specific public policies such as funding of programs which motivate young girls to study physics and the setting of better conditions for female scientists,” Montes said. “In my personal case, it is a turning point since it allows me to stop for a while and reflect on what we have done and what still remains to be done. I hope also this will be a starting point for joint work in the region.”

Strubbe’s talk at the April Meeting will focus on the “expected signatures of tidal disruptions” of black holes.

“I study how stars get ripped apart by massive black holes in the centers of galaxies,” Strubbe said. “It’s a really exciting time to study black holes eating stars–for the first time, we’re starting to be able to discover and observationally follow up this type of event in real time. My research is specifically on predicting and understanding the light emitted in these events, important for helping us find black holes eating stars and interpreting newly discovered events. I have quite a bit of experience teaching and giving talks, so I think I’ll be able to do a good job explaining and reviewing the physics of this phenomenon to a broad audience.”

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Editor: Alan Chodos
Staff Science Writer: Michael Lucibella

February 2013 (Volume 22, Number 2)

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Articles in this Issue
Funding Uncertainty Plagues Science as Sequestration Cuts Still Threaten
APS Sponsors the Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics
APS Membership Stands at 49,653; Students, Foreign Members Increase
Beller, Marshak Lectures to Enhance March and April Meeting Programs
APS Releases Colorful New Science App
Ozel, Alexander Convey the Excitement of Physics
Top Physics Newsmakers of 2012
Letters to the Editor
The Back Page
Members in the Media
This Month in Physics History
Washington Dispatch
International News
Education Corner
Moving Forward