If drinking from a fire hose is your idea of a good time, a stint in the policymaking arena might be just the thing. That’s how Colin McCormick describes the flood of information he had to filter as a congressional fellow. McCormick began his fellowship in 2003 straight out of his PhD studies in nonlinear optics and is now a postdoc at NIST. He says he’d “love to find a way to do both science and policy.”
More than 100 scientists went to work in Congress and executive branch agencies this fall in an American Association for the Advancement of science program. A half dozen are physical scientists sponsored by the American Institute for Physics (AIP), which has a fellow in Congress and, with the American Astronomical society, one in the State Department; the American Physical Society (APS); the American Geophysical Union (AGU); and the Optical Society of America (OSA)....
