Pushpa Bhat
At its summer meeting this August, the International Committee for Future Accelerators accepted the proposal by its Linear Collider Board and approved the formation of the International Development Team with a mandate to make preparations for the International Linear Collider Pre-Lab in Japan, by the end of 2021. The Pre-Lab, a precursor to the ILC Laboratory, is expected to be launched at the end of the mandate of the International Development Team and after securing the approval from the Japanese government for the ILC project.
For Reham Aly from Egypt, now a graduate student on CMS at the University of Bari, Italy, this was the first visit to the United States and Fermilab. She had been invited to come to work at the Fermilab LHC Physics Center for two months. Another student, Angela Taliercio, an Italian working on her Ph.D. at the University of Louvain, Belgium, had visited the LPC in 2018. The rewarding experience she had, she says, made her want to come back. Reham and Angela spent staggered two-month periods at Fermilab, from October to December 2019.
Robert Knapp of Evergreen State College will give a colloquium titled “The Greening of Buildings.” The building sector is a key locus for promoting sustainability since it accounts for more than 40% of energy use in the U.S. and a similar proportion in greenhouse gas emissions. The colloquium will outline technical and organizational moves needed for progress, address technical and social prospects and limits for sustainable energy as it pertains to buildings, and provide specific inventions that would make a difference.
Nature magazine published a column in 2015 titled, “Physicists, your planet needs you.” It was a call from prominent climatologists to physicists to help solve some of nature’s mysteries that are crucial to modeling the climate. Our Colloquium speaker this Wednesday, John Bradley Marston of Brown University, will speak about the fascinating connection he has unraveled between aspects of broken symmetry, condensed matter physics and climate science.