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DPP Winter 2000 Newsletter | Table of Contents | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4 | Page 5 | Page 6 | Page 7 | Page 8 | Minutes of Executive Committee Meeting
Division of Plasma Physics (DPP) Attendees: ExCom Members: Miklos Porkolab, Jim Drake, Allen Boozer, Nat Fisch, Vincent Chan, Bill Kruer, Richard Hazeltine, Michael Brown, Sam Cohen, Joel Fajans, John Finn, Walter Gekelman, Tom Jarboe, Mark Koepke, Martin Lampe, Scott Parker Members Elect: Peter Gary, Martin Peng, Richard Petrasso Sub-Committee Chairs: Don Correll, Loren Steinhauer, Bruce Remington Guests: Andrei Smolyakov (attended on behalf of Richard Marchand), Michael Lubell, M. Wakatani, Noah Hershkowitz, Rejean Boivin, Real Decoste, Tudor Johnston, Donna Baudrau, Mike Mauel, Trish Lettieri, Judy Franz, Barrie Ripin, Martha Redi, Gerry Rogoff Administrator/Editor DPP Newsletter: Saralyn Stewart Opening Remarks and Announcement of New ExCom Members and Guests‚Porkolab Miklos Porkolab called the meeting to order at 10:00 AM and announced the 1999 DPP election results. New ExCom members, Peter Gary, Martin Peng and Richard Petrasso, and the vice-chair elect, Martin Lampe, were introduced. Their terms will start after this meeting. Review of Action Items‚Porkolab All action items have been completed. Further discussions of science hot topics and joint DPP/ICCP meeting was deferred to later agenda. Request for Endorsement of Future Meetings‚Porkolab Miklos explained the procedure for endorsement. A letter of request has to be submitted to the DPP Chair for discussion with ExCom. Subject to approval, the Chair will ask APS for endorsement. The request from the Sherwood Theory Meeting has been submitted to APS awaiting a decision. The Conference on Frontier Science on NIF has been asked to submit a specific proposal at the spring 2000 ExCom. Discussion of the 2001 RF Conference will be done via e-mail. Jim Drake asked whether DPP has to endorse every meeting that comes along. The Chair will ask for input from Judy Franz. March Executive Committee Minutes‚Chan The March minutes were passed without revision (motion: Boozer, seconded by Koepke). Secretary-Treasurer Report‚Chan Vincent Chan reported the DPP account as of 9/30/99 had a total asset of $254,170, which included retained earnings of $163,872 and net revenue of $90, 298. The Educational Outreach Program has received institutional contributions totaling $3100, and personal contribution totaling $1900 this year to date. Letters of appreciation have been sent to the contributors. Based on the pre-registration number, DPP99 was projected to achieve at least a balanced budget. A motion was proposed that DPP would no longer provide free refreshment at the annual meeting (motion: Cohen, seconded by Koepke). The motion was defeated. A list of noteworthy items since DPP98 was summarized. This included a change in the APS by-law to hand over the oversight of the thesis awards to the individual units. The units' bylaws should also be changed to reflect this change. Action Item: The secretary-treasurer will draft the changes in the DPP bylaws to be sent to the ExCom via e-mail for approval. UFA: Report on Snowmass-Mauel Mike Mauel reported that the Snowmass meeting was a success. Based on an informal poll, participants would like to do it again. He suggested that DPP should consider taking a more active role for the next meeting. International Cooperation‚Porkolab/Drake Wakatani reported that the JSPF meeting would be held in Sapporo, Japan in early December 2000. Jim Lyon (ORNL) and John Rice (MIT) are invited speakers for this year's meeting at Sendai. Porkolab reported for Lister on the EPS meeting. A new prize named for H. AlfvÈn is being established by EPS to be awarded each year. This is the equivalent of the DPP Maxwell Prize. In order to have a strong representation in the paper selection, Miklos requested that travel funds be provided by DPP for him to attend three committee meetings. Funding was approved with a limit of no more than $1000/trip. Drake suggested that it is the responsibility of the program committee to nominate talks for the APS Spring Meeting and also be more active in the EPS paper nomination. Education and Outreach‚Correll/ Remington/Rogoff Don Correll has replaced Tom Simonen as the chair of the Education and Outreach subcommittee. Simonen/Correll submitted a written report. Action Item: The DPP Chair will write a letter thanking Tom Simonen for his service. Don reported that with the committed funding from DPP, APS-wide, DOE, and contributions from institutions and individuals, the DPP99 Teachers' Day and Plasma Sciences Expo should achieve a balanced budget. 4000 students coming from as far as Oregon were expected to attend the Expo. It was decided not to have the Expo at DPP00. There will still be a Teachers' Day and a budget for that will be submitted to the secretary-treasurer before the Spring ExCom meeting. Correll will also recommend the person in charge of organizing the event. Porkolab reported for Ron McKnight that the deadline for young faculty award is Feb 10, 2000. A new RFP for the DOE/NSF plasma science initiative will be out soon. Remington, chair of the public information committee, submitted a written report. There were extended discussions on why the response to Ben Stein's request for "hot topics" was so poor. A motion (by Porkolab, seconded by Gekelman) was passed that the program chair, together with his subcommittee chairs, will be responsible for providing input to the public information committee. The program chair should also sit on the public information committee in the future. An amendment (by Fisch, seconded by Cohen) to have the program chair responsible for selecting the highlights failed. Rogoff, representative from the Coalition for Plasma Science, submitted a written report. Rogoff proposed a conference panel session on communicating with non-scientists for future DPP meetings. The ExCom will discuss this further and vote on it for the Long Beach meeting. Porkolab related a request from CPS for annual support from DPP. A motion (by Boozer) for DPP to provide $5k annual contribution to CPS to be funded from registration fees was passed. Report on 1999 Seattle Meeting and Future Meeting Sites-Drake/Steinhauer/Baudrau Drake reported that the number of papers for this meeting exceeded the New Orleans meeting number. Drake related a request from Bhattacharjee, chair of the plasma astrophysics topical group, for DPP to provide $2000 to support operation of the topical group. It was pointed out that NSF funds may be available to support running mini-conferences, and the astrophysics group should look into that. The sense of ExCom is the DPP should provide assistance to all the mini-conferences, instead of specifically identifying funds for the topical group. A motion (by Fisch, seconded by Koepke) was passed to increase the budget, from $2k to $5k, available to the program chair at his discretion to produce the best program. A motion (by Boozer, seconded by Lampe) to provide an additional $2k to the plasma astrophysics topical group for operation failed. Steinhauer/Baudrau reported 1180 preregistered for this meeting and 200 expected on-site. The companion tour was cancelled because of too few sign-ups. 30 people attended the companion breakfast. The ExCom has approved Albuquerque for DPP2003 and Savannah for DPP2004. 2000 Quebec Meeting‚Decoste/Johnston R. Boivin has agreed to be the DPP local chair for DPP2000/ICPP. R. Decoste reported on the ICPP situation for the Quebec City meeting. His group will take care of the local organization and M. Tendler is the ICPP program chair. Action Item: The ICPP representatives and DPP officers will work out the detailed agreement during this week. Registration income will be under the control of DPP and ICPP will submit a budget at the Spring ExCom meeting. DPP Prizes and Awards-Ripin/Brown The Plasma Dissertation Award has assets of $46,833 and the Plasma Excellence Award $120,352. Ripin reported that Maxwell Technology has agreed to continue funding the Maxwell Prize on a year to year basis at the $5k/yr level. The Nicholson medal has become an APS-wide award to be given out at the March meeting and has broadened its charter. This has made the selection process more difficult. R. Gould has withdrawn as chair of the selection committee and has recommended APS to narrow its charter to one area such as mentorship and education. DPP will propose H. Berk as a replacement to APS. Barrie Ripin will be leaving APS in January. The ExCom acknowledged Barrie's contribution in integrating DPP with APS. Action Item: Brown and Gekelman will form a committee to work out the logistics to give a student poster award at the DPP meeting. They will report to the ExCom in the spring meeting. Brown will also work with Rogoff and Remington to decide on a science media published article award. This will have to be approved by APS. Brown will present a proposal in spring. APS Matters-Franz/Lettieri Drake noted that in the annual U.S. News and World Report rating of top schools in the fields of physics, plasma physics was not included as one of the fields even though DPP is one of the larger divisions in APS. Jim requested that Judy Franz write a letter to the magazine to inquire about this. Franz has agreed and also invited Jim to come to the APS Executive Board meeting in February to raise this issue. Lettieri reported that as of 10/99, the DPP membership was 2,351 or 5.72% of APS membership. Percentage-wise, this represented a continuous decline since 1996. Ideas to increase membership were solicited. Action Item: The secretary-treasurer will send a letter to APS members who have let their DPP memberships lapse urging them to rejoin. Action Item: Porkolab will draft a letter to members encouraging them to write to Congress to support science funding. Women in Plasma Physics‚Redi Martha Redi has written to the ExCom raising several issues regarding women representation in DPP. She was invited to present her requests to the ExCom for discussion and endorsement. The ExCom strongly supported the sense of the proposal and the following motions were passed. First (by Hazeltine, seconded by Fajans)--We would like to see the Division adopt a goal of consistent representation for women on the program committee and as invited speakers. The goal should be to include at least two women for the program committee. Second (by Drake, seconded by Finn)--It is the policy of the DPP to encourage the active participation of under represented groups in the Division by promoting their membership and leadership on the various committees and executive positions. The DPP ExCom will evaluate the progress in this area each year at the fall meeting. Ripin suggested that the DPP should actively promote this policy to the other conferences. Action Item: Porkolab has appointed Lampe and Peng to form a committee with help from Redi to conduct a survey on female members and fellows in DPP and to report back to the ExCom at the next meeting. At least one female should be asked to serve on this committee. Councilor's Report‚Kruer Kruer reported that the APS council has approved a reduction in the number of councilors. Each division will have only one councilor irrespective of size. The council for further consideration has also endorsed new pricing for journals, based on the nature of the institutions. Miscellaneous DPP Items APS fellowship nomination is due April 1, 2000. For the first time, the DPP newsletter was published on the web. Lampe reported that NRL scientists missed the paper version and few have checked out the e-version. To improve the ease of access, a suggestion is to have both HTML and PDF versions, and also to consider adding highlights and a link to the web page in electronic announcements. Porkolab asked Stewart to work with the publication committee on improvements. John Cary raised the question whether the publication committee should continue to publish a collection of recent plasma physics Ph.D. theses. This was a time consuming task and needed to be justified. Drake suggested an alternative is to ask authors who wish to have their theses recognized send in a title and abstract. Boozer reported that speakers for the DPP Spring Symposium have been chosen. It will be on Saturday, April 29, 2000. Porkolab gave permission to S. Cohen to use e-mail to send information on new physics and astronomy classified schemes to DPP members. The ExCom thanked Porkolab for his service as the chair for the past year The meeting adjourned at 6:15 PM. Review of Action Items from This Meeting‚Chan
Respectfully submitted,
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