Dear
Participants:
Welcome
to the twenty-sixth annual Rochester Symposium for Physics Students
(RSPS). . The
RSPS was instituted to provide an opportunity for undergraduates to
present an account of their own personal research at a meeting whose
format was chosen to closely resemble those of professional scientific
societies.
At
these symposia, research projects have been presented in talks or
poster sessions by undergraduates representing many regional
institutions. . Topics
have included condensed-matter physics, atomic physics and optics,
computational physics, astronomy, particle and nuclear physics,
instrumentation and techniques, environmental physics, biological
physics, medical physics, and educational physics. . The
abstracts of all the participants' papers are published annually in a
volume of the proceedings and distributed to the participants. (see:
http://spider.pas.rochester.edu/mainFrame/education/special/specialRSPS.html).
Since
2000, the RSPS ABSTRACT abstract proceedings
are also published on-line at:
http://servermac.pas.rochester.edu/yigal/rsps/proceedings/. . Students
who present these talks can list their RSPS presentation(s) on their
resumes and show the above web page in their list of publications as an
"On-line Published Abstract". . We
encourage students to follow up on their research with the aim of
giving a presentation at a regular APS meeting (which now also has a
special session on undergraduate research), and eventually follow up
with a publication in a regular journal, or in the APS Journal of
Undergraduate Research. . In
2006, RSPS was held
for the first time at a location other than Rochester. The
2006 meeting at Houghton College was a great success, and with great success, the RSPS was held at
Houghton College, which is the first time in itÕs history of
being held elsewhere. Thus RSPS anticipates
visiting a new venue every couple of years.
At
Rochester, the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Institute of
Optics are jointly running two National Science Foundation (NSF) funded
Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) sites. We encourage
you to apply to one of these summer programs. . Examples of
research projects, talks, publications and awards won by our REU
participants can be found on our Web page:
http://server-mac.pas.rochester.edu/yigal/reuproject//reuparticipants.html. . For
example: Stephen Thorndike, an REU undergraduate, working with
Professor Alice Quillen in the summer of 2002, discovered a new planet. . Their
findings have been published in the Astrophysical Journal. . Examples
of recent awards won by REU students at Rochester include (1) Govind S.
Krishnaswami who won the 1999 Apker Award, given by the APS for the
best undergraduate research in the USA in Physics, for his work with
Professor Sarada Rajeev in theoretical particle physics, (2) Grant
Tremblay, Matthew Barczys and Kevin Flaherty won the Astronomical
Society of New York (ANSY) Undergraduate Student Prize for a
distinguished research paper in Astronomy in 2000, 2005, and 2006
respectively, and (3) Albert Torr-Jong Wang, who worked in condensed- matter physics with
Professor Steve Teitel, and was one of the three Apker Award Finalist
in 2001.
Your
audience will include both students and faculty members and will
provide you with the opportunity to address a knowledgeable and
appreciative assembly of fellow researchers. . Scientific research is
an extraordinary activity. . We certainly hope that
many of you will decide to pursue careers thatwhich involve you intimately
in mankind's greatest intellectual adventure, to comprehend nature. . To
quote Albert Einstein, "The eternal mystery of the world is its
comprehensibility."
Frank
Wolfs (co-chairs
RSPS)
Department
of Physics and Astronomy
Universityoffor Rochesterr