By Bill Nichols, BoV Chair
If you’ve considered supporting the Department of Physics, then the Physics Board of Visitors (BoV) wants you! This invitation highlights the crucial and engaging opportunities available to friends and alumni of the department. The BoV, an independent council of dedicated supporters, meets biannually to advise on matters of importance. It serves as a critical bridge between the department’s academic mission and the broader community, helping to steer its future and to enhance its impact.
A Comprehensive Mission
The BoV operates under a formal charge to champion the Department of Physics from every angle. Its core responsibilities are comprehensive: serving as ambassadors to increase public awareness of the department’s achievements, assisting in fundraising efforts, and advocating for its interests.
Beyond advocacy, the board provides high-level strategic advice. This includes advising on optimizing the impact of the department’s research activities and helping to assess the societal impact of new research directions. The BoV is also directly committed to the student body, providing mentoring, networking opportunities, and career assistance to undergraduates, graduate students, and post-doctoral associates.
Current Initiatives: Enhancing Prestige and Building Pipelines
The BoV’s current broad emphasis is on enhancing the department’s long-term prestige. A key component of this strategy is supporting the growth of the faculty which, thanks to the support of Letters & Science Dean Eric Wilcots, is approaching historic highs. This growth translates directly into more impactful research, prestigious awards, and successful graduates, building on the department’s long history of producing top-tier PhDs for academia, national labs, and industry.
A major recent focus, prompted by Dean Wilcots, is to strengthen the pipeline for undergraduate physics majors seeking employment immediately after their bachelor’s degree. While a physics degree and successful programs like AMEP have always provided a strong foundation, the BoV advised on recent changes to the Physics curriculum to make students even more competitive. This new curriculum increases flexibility, allowing students to acquire in-demand skills like computing and large data set analysis. Concurrently, the BoV is identifying and securing summer internships, which are considered vital by many employers.
Our newest initiative is to mitigate today’s budget challenges by leveraging the department’s key technology thrusts including quantum information systems, fusion research, artificial intelligence, and others, to forge partnerships with industry and government programs. This initiative has just been launched, and we are actively soliciting new members to help bring it to fruition.
The Adventures of the Board
Service on the BoV is not just hard work; it is also an intellectual adventure. Members satisfy their own curiosity at every meeting with research presentations from students and faculty, offering a front-row seat to the department’s cutting-edge work.
The role also includes field trips to some of the world’s most advanced research facilities. This fall, we joined the Astronomy BoV for a daylong tour of Fermilab. In the recent past, BoV members have visited CERN in Geneva, Switzerland; Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory in California; and the Physical Science Laboratory in Stoughton, Wisconsin — home of the WHAM plasma fusion device and where IceCube’s Digital Optical Modules are made.
Please consider joining the BoV not only to assist the Department of Physics in defining and achieving its goals, but also to have privileged access to leading-edge research, intellectual stimulation, and tours of some of the most famous and awe-inspiring physics laboratories in the world.
