Before 2007 technology companies like Xerox, IBM, and Agilent Technologies served as hosts for the annual Industrial Physics Forum (IPF) managed by the American Institute of Physics. And rightfully so. They belong to the AIP Corporate Associates Program, which connects its more than 30 members to the basic research community that AIP member societies serve. At IPF meetings, experts from the public and private sectors give invited talks on such industrially relevant issues as sustainable energy , imaging technologies , and superconductivity applications .
But since 2007 the IPF has been held in conjunction with conferences such as the American Physical Society March Meeting and AVS’s annual symposium, which draw hundreds to thousands of attendees from academia, government, and industry. Attendees at the bigger conference could scan the IPF program and duck in just to hear their favorite expert talk. In past forums, presentations by Harvard University’s Federico Capasso, a pioneer of quantum cascade lasers , and BP chief scientist Ellen Williams drew standing-room-only crowds.
Down by the sea
This week’s IPF is full of firsts and has its own flavor. It is the first one that AIP has held outside the US. That’s because this year’s host is the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics , located in the northeastern Italian seaport of Trieste. Although the ICTP’s focus on theoretical physics seems far off from industry’s focus on applied research, it also happens to be an AIP Corporate Associate and is increasingly supporting research in such areas as renewable energy technologies and biostatistics. So at least for the purposes of this week’s IPF theme—“Capacity Building for Industrial Physics in Developing and Emerging Economies”—the center is “the perfect host,” says its director, Guatemalan native and theoretical physicist Fernando Quevedo. “Capacity building is what we do.”
Every year the ICTP awards academic scholarships and professional grants to and hosts dozens of conferences and workshops for scientists and students from such regions as Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Southeast Asia—that was the vision of the late physics Nobelist Salam, a Pakistani native who founded the ICTP. Several scientists from those regions also live and conduct research on the Trieste campus. The map shown here highlights the more than 25 countries that will be represented at the forum, and that’s only accounting for speakers and other invited attendees and not the ICTP resident scientists who are likely to attend.
Among others firsts, the “capacity building” theme is a departure from the single-focus themes of the past. As a result, this IPF will be the first to have physics education sessions, which have been designed to address the growing need for more and better scientists and engineers in emerging countries such as India, China, and Singapore. “Most of the corporate associates now have a global presence,” says IPF codirector and AIP associate vice president Philip Hammer. He cites the example of corporate associate General Motors, which, just within the past decade, expanded its R&D to every continent (not including Antarctica, as far as we know).
An end in mind
Several talks and the poster sessions—yet another IPF first—will cover such topics as renewable energy, microfluidics, and medical diagnostics. The “Frontiers in physics” session, a popular one at previous IPFs, will feature research scientists presenting (potentially) groundbreaking but often not yet industrially relevant work on, for example, quantum metrology and time-reversal techniques for microscopy.
Most importantly, at least for Hammer and codirector Joe Niemela, a resident ICTP scientist, this IPF will be the first with an explicit end in mind. On the last day of the forum, attendees will be divided into breakout groups for capacity-building action planning sessions, whose goal is to seed collaborations that will organize and carry out specific development projects in the represented regions.
Other sponsors of this week’s IPF include the UK-based Institute of Physics and two Trieste-based organizations: the Central European Initiative and TWAS, the academy of sciences for the developing world.
