On February 3, 2014 UWIP members Ayat Amin and Melisa Tallis volunteered at KPCORE’s High School Outreach program for Filipino students, where they presented physics demonstrations. Some demos that students interacted with include the ballistic pendulum, the solenoid, the pig and mirror optical illusion, the prism, and the magnet with iron filings. The high schools students were very enthusiastic about the demos and followed up with plenty of questions on the physics concepts.
On March 13, the evening before Pi Day of 2014, UWIP hosted a talk by Professor John Eggers- an engaging, energetic math professor at UCSD. He gave a presentation on planimeters, which are compass-like devices used to prove Green’s theorem. Attendees got the opportunity to use some of the planimeters from professor Eggers’ personal collection on maps of various states. They measured the area of the state by tracing the border of it with a planimeter and reading off the area approximation on the device. Afterwards, UWIP served delicious pies from Julian Pie Company to make it a true Pi Day event!
The event will begin with a short presentation on the recent history of women in physical sciences. A panel of undergrads, grads, alumni, and professors will speak about their personal experiences and what they think are the most important steps to get more women into physical sciences.Then there will be dialogue with the attendees, splitting into small groups focusing on how we can use education, actions, mindset, and policy to increase the representation and contributions of women in physical sciences.
Expanding Your Horizons is an annual conference aimed to interest girls, aged 11 to 16, in science, math, and engineering. Participants attend talks, participate in hands-on workshops, and meet with women scientists and engineers. Group activities are designed to introduce the participants to other like-minded girls who are considering careers in science. Debby Tran and Melisa Tallis served as mentors at this year’s conference.
Link to Conference: http://www.eyhsandiego.org/index.htm
Fellow UWIP members, Melisa Tallis and Debby Tran, posing with the ACSSA club from UCSD at this year’s Expand Your Horizon’s Conference which was held at USD.
CUWIP, Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics, is annual, national conference that provides females physics students with the opportunity to experience a professional conference, information about graduate school and professions in physics, and access to other women in physics of all ages with whom they can share experiences, advice, and ideas. UWIP has attended as group for the past 2 years, and hopes to continue to do so.
If anyone is interested in collaborating with Physics Girl on Youtube, feel free to contact her directly (email below). She is currently open to suggestions, but is also looking for helping researching physics concepts, having people be in here videos, in addition to script writing. This is a fun way to learn about physics outside your classes so I definitely suggest emailing her!
Youtube chanel: http://www.youtube.com/user/physicswoman
Contact info: physicswoman@gmail.com
On February 20, UWIP hosted a talk with UCSD Professor Vivek Sharma on the search for the Higgs boson particle. Professor Sharma is an experimental particle physicist who is currently involved in the search for the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland. By smashing ultra-energetic protons and examining the resulting sub-atomic debris, he attempts to understand the fundamental constituents of this universe. After the talk, UWIP members had an opportunity to interact with professor Sharma at a personal level at Regent’s Pizza.
Link to Sharma’s research here: http://vsharma.ucsd.edu