Annual Report 2013 of the Physics and Engineering (P&E) Section#

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1- Section members nominated 37 new members by May 31, 2012. Another nomination arrived post-deadline. The Section Committee ranked these nominations at its meeting at the Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique, Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS), Paris on Monday, 10 June 2013. One last deferred and carried forward candidate from the 2012 (Bergen) nominations cycle was later also ranked. Our final nomination list had 39 candidates of which two were women. The membership Selection Committee selected 15 candidates (Physics, Engineering and Foreign members) out of the total of 39. Only one of the women went through. The fraction of women in the P&E Section is still very small. During this meeting several other issues of importance to the Section and AE were discussed or presented: i) criteria for nomination and acceptance of candidates, ii) Open-Access (OA) Publications and their importance for all researchers in all fields of learning, iii) plans to establish an AE Knowledge Hub in Bergen, iv) preliminary plans to establish a particle-therapy centre in Bergen following the successful workshop organised by the P&E Section on “Heavy Ions in Science and Health”, and the work of EASAC (the European Academies’ Science Advisory Council) which concentrates on the topics of energy, environment and health.

2- Karlheinz Langanke (Germany) was elected as new Section Committee member at the Paris AE P&E Section Committee meeting. At the same meeting, the Section Committee members elected a new section Vice-chair, Pavel Exner. Furthermore, the Section elected two new Section Committee members in September: Tamás Csörgő (Hungary) and Sydney Galès (France). All these elections were approved by the AE Council.

3- The P&E Section helped the Young Academy with the organisation of a parallel session at the AE Annual General Conference (AGC) that was held in Wrocław, Poland in the period 17-19 September 2013. The parallel session on Subatomic Physics had the title: “Understanding the Universe” and dealt with the theory developments and the progress in the ongoing experimental programme at LHC/CERN. This was a very successful workshop also in the light of the Nobel Prize last year for the discovery of the Higgs particle.

4- A meeting of the Physics and Engineering Section was organised on Sunday, 15 September from 15:00 to 16:30, i.e. preceding the AE formal activities and AGC. Unfortunately, the attendance was very low because most of the Section members arrived either late on Sunday or on Monday, 16 September.