April 1, 2006
Dear Participants:
Welcome to the twenty-fifth annual Rochester Symposium for Physics Students (RSPS). We are pleased to announce this year's Symposium is to be held at Houghton College, the first time in the twenty-four year symposium history that it will be held away from the University of Rochester. The symposia 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 RSPS 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, high-energy physics, instrumentation and techniques, and environmental physics, biophysics and medphysics. 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).
In addition, since 2000, the RSPS ABSTRACT proceedings are also published on-line at: http://server-mac.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.
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. I 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: In 1999, the Apker Award, given by the APS for the best undergraduate research in the USA in Physics, was awarded to Govind S. Krishnaswami, who worked with Professor Sarada Rajeev in theoretical particle physics. In 2005, Kevin Flaherty and in 2000, Matthew Barczys won the Astronomical Society of New York (ANSY) Undergraduate Student Prize for a distinguished research paper in Astronomy. In 2001, Albert Torr-Jong Wang, who worked in condensed matter physics with Professor Steve Teitel, was one of the three Apker Award Finalist.
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. To quote Albert Einstein, "The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible." I certainly hope that many of you will decide to pursue careers which involve you intimately in mankind's greatest intellectual adventure, to comprehend nature.
Arie Bodek, Chair
Department of Physics and Astronomy
University for Rochester