April 5, 2008

 

 

 

INTRODUCTION

 

 

 

Dear Participants:

Welcome to the twenty-seventh 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. at: http://www.pas.rochester.edu/urpas/page/specialrsps.

 

Since 2000, the RSPS ABSTRACT abstract proceedings are also published on-line at: http://www.pas.rochester.edu/www/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 a new venue every third year. In 2009 RSPS will be hosted at West Point Military Academy.

 

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 at: http://www.pas.rochester.edu/urpas/page/specialreu. 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
University offor Rochester