Some 70 (mostly) female physics majors are convening this month for the Second Annual Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics at the University of Southern California. Two USC graduate students came up with the idea for the conference, which now looks set to become not only annual but also imitated.
It started with idle chitchat a couple of years ago, when Katie Mussack, who is in the final stretch of her PhD in theoretical solar physics, and Amy Cassidy, a fourth-year graduate student whose research is on the thermalization of one-dimensional Bose gases, wondered what they might do to increase the number of women who go on to graduate school in physics. At USC, says Mussack, “there is a huge discrepancy” between the proportions of women in the physics undergraduate and graduate programs—32% and 12%, respectively. “We thought we might be able to help others make the transition” to graduate...
