New Perspectives has been an annual tradition at Fermilab since 1996, hosted each year by the Fermilab Student & Postdoc Association (FSPA) during the week of the Users Meeting. Its primary purpose has always been to provide a welcoming venue for young persons at Fermilab to present their research, but in recent years the FSPA has been focusing efforts on emphasizing another important purpose for this conference: service to the Fermilab community.
We want to show the community that New Perspectives is the ideal forum to learn first-hand about all of the exciting research being done at Fermilab, in many cases from a new point of view. It’s our belief that this makes for an exciting complement to the program of the Users Meeting, and we’re working hard to get the word out. In particular, we are lobbying senior members of our community to attend to support their young colleagues (and, on a practical level, it’s a great opportunity for them to meet the talented students that could one day be their talented postdocs).
New Perspectives 2016 will offer to the community a comprehensive program designed to span the breadth and depth of research at the lab, departing from the trend of recent years by explicitly highlighting many of the novel R&D projects being done outside of the Fermilab spotlight. The program includes overview talks that cover the recent and ongoing efforts within the Accelerator, Technical, and Computing divisions, as well as a number of talks that represent more specific projects on the technical and accelerator development side. Mixed into the “traditional” sessions, which cover some of the more visible experimental efforts (think NOvA, CMS, MicroBooNE), you’ll see that there are sessions that instead focus on the work being done at test stands around the lab and exciting projects that explore applications of deep learning and artificial intelligence in physics research.
The 2016 Fermilab Student & Postdoc Association officers are, from left, Sebastian Aderhold (Fermilab), Nitin Yadav (Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati), Mateus F. Carneiro (Brazilian Center for Physics Research), Cindy Joe (Fermilab), Elena Gramellini (Yale University), Rob Fine (University of Rochester). Photo: Rashmi Shivni, OC
You’ll also find new to this year’s program a series of invited talks, “Experiment X in 10 Minutes,” which will be presented by motivated young researchers whose purpose is to update the community on their experiment’s progress, with an emphasis on clarity of explanation. In this way, we hope to introduce the community to many of the varied, exciting projects happening at Fermilab to new students and seasoned veterans alike, in a digestible format. So, if you’ve ever found yourself wondering if ANNIE is the latest project from the Fermilab Musical Society (spoiler: it’s not), or if DarkSide is the DOD’s Star Wars-inspired research initiative (spoiler: it’s not), be sure to drop in for these quick primers on important Fermilab research projects.
New Perspectives 2016 will take place at Fermilab in One West (Wilson Hall) all day on Tuesday, June 13, and Wednesday, June 14. Registration is free, and all are welcome to attend!
Online registration closes on June 1 at 23:59 CDT.
Elena Gramellini and Rob Fine are officers of the Fermilab Student & Postdoc Association.