2014 CAP Congress DNP Annual Business Meeting Minutes
The meeting was called to order by DNP Chairperson Zisis Papandreou (ZP) at 12:22 on Tuesday, 17 June 2014, at which time 25 DNP members were present. Three more members arrived late.
The chairperson introduced the executive committee and presented an agenda for approval; Chairperson-Elect Reiner Kruecken (RK) moved to adopt the agenda, the motion was seconded by Past Chairperson Jens Dilling, and in the absence of objections or additions the agenda was adopted. The 2013-2015 CAP DNP Executive Committee is as follows.
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Zisis Papandreou | Regina | Chairperson |
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Barry Davids | TRIUMF | Secretary-Treasurer |
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Reiner Kruecken | TRIUMF & UBC | Chairperson-Elect |
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Jens Dilling | TRIUMF | Past Chairperson |
Canadian Institute of Nuclear Physics (CINP) Executive Director Garth Huber (GH) described a survey form produced by Compute Canada to assess future needs. The Chief Scientific Officer of Compute Canada, Dugan O’Neil, will provide this form to Garth for distribution to CINP members. GH then made a short presentation on the 2016-2021 NSERC Subatomic Physics Long Range Planning (LRP) process. A nuclear physics brief will be prepared by the CINP Scientific Working Group (SWG) chairs next year for the larger NSERC LRP committee and a town hall meeting is planned for May or June 2015, likely to be held in Vancouver or Edmonton, the site of the 2015 CAP Congress. The SWG chairs will be soliciting material from our members in the course of preparing the brief, and both GH and ZP emphasized that having a well-populated DNP photo gallery will be very helpful for this work. Photos of our members, including e.g. excited young students and detectors, are being and will be solicited. Demographic information on highly qualified personnel will be needed for the LRP, especially concerning those who have left academia. The names and contact info of these individuals should be sent to GH.
Next, Carleton University Professor Kevin Graham addressed the meeting to describe a detector facility funded by TRIUMF and an NSERC MRS whose resources are administered by a prioritization board made up of high energy physicists. The facility is available for any and all subatomic physics work across Canada and can be accessed by writing a short description of the work desired, its approximate schedule, and the number of FTEs required to complete it. This request should be addressed to board chair Tom Mattison but can be transmitted via Kevin at kevin_graham@carleton.ca . The facility is described on the web page http://www.physics.carleton.ca/research/instrumentation-development .
Secretary-Treasurer Barry Davids (BD) then presented a brief financial and membership report, summarized below.
In the year from Jan 1 2013 – Dec 31 2013, we (intentionally) ran an operating deficit of $3636.60, leaving our balance at $8082.16. Our operating expenses during 2013 comprised $570.28 for an upgrade of the DNP website, a $26.32 charge for a CAP-NSERC liaison committee meeting, $1000 each for the 2010-2011, 2011-2012, and 2012-2013 DNP thesis prize winners Richard Hydomako, Stephan Ettenauer, and Paul Finlay, respectively, and $1000 to support the travel of 2013 Congress Plenary speaker Brad Sherrill. Offsetting these $4596.60 in expenditures were $960 in revenue from 96 full memberships at $10 each.
As of May 9, 2014 we had 122 full members and 82 student members, for a total of 204 members. This represents a small decrease from 2013’s 123 full members and 88 student members. Total membership has declined by 6% over 3 years, mainly due to a 10% decrease in student members.
If membership remains roughly constant as it has recently, we can expect to be able to spend ~$1250 per year without diminishing our cash reserves. With the usual annual expenditures of $1000 for the DNP thesis prize and $250 for WNPPC student prizes, we had (as of Dec 31, 2013) an $8000 surplus to spend on support for invited speakers, student conference support, etc.
In February 2013 the new DNP Bylaws approved by the DNP executive committee were presented to the CAP executive in the hope that the CAP council would vote to approve them in the spring or Congress meetings. Though the bylaws were received positively by Gabor Kunstatter and Ken Ragan, the DNP never heard back regarding a vote. They are in effect as far as the division is concerned.
A regular election of the Chairperson-Elect and Secretary-Treasurer for 2 year terms from 2015-2017 will be held next year. Nominations for these two positions are planned to be solicited by the Secretary-Treasurer via email in February 2015.
The discussions which took place during and after the Secretary-Treasurer’s report were kindly recorded by ZP and are summarized below.
– More students should be approached to join DNP as members.
– Jean Barrette (JB) asked how much of a reserve should be left in the DNP account at the end of each year; BD answered that $1000 would be sufficient. JB felt that we should maintain around $2000. Svetlana Barkanova expressed her view that it is indeed important to keep a sufficient reserve.
– The DNP Executive should consider ways to showcase students and their accomplishments, including through awards and our website.
– Comment from CINP Executive Director (Garth Huber): DNP has about 100 more members than CINP, so CINP would like to attract some of our members, since their membership is free
– We should think of how to capture student stats, their current whereabouts, and track them, as well as look for testimonials for our website.
– Adam Sarty updated us on the changes to the CAP bylaws required to conform to the new Canadian Not-for-profit Corporations Act. The most salient points were that the CAP executive will be renamed the Board of Directors and that individual divisions will no longer have separate bylaws. Rather, a standard set for all divisions will be adopted. This is especially convenient since no divisions other than the DNP have adopted bylaws. The DNP bylaws will be modified appropriately for consistency with the new CAP Bylaws and will serve as the template for the general divisional bylaws. Where necessary, divisions will be able to adopt special provisions such as thesis prizes.
– The Particle Physics and Theoretical Physics Divisions (PPD and DTP) both implemented a PhD Thesis prize modelled after ours.
ZP and RK then reported on the 2012-2013 DNP Thesis Prize competition. There were 5 entries and the winner Paul Finlay of the University of Guelph gave a talk at the 2014 CAP Congress. In the course of this year’s competition, guidelines were established and a scoring template produced, which will be helpful for future competitions. The nomination due date is October 1st and the procedures are explained on the Award webpage.
Next ZP described some recent activities of the division, including the partial sponsorship of 3 student prizes at the 2014 WNPPC (for which the bill had not yet arrived). The DNP has offered $4000 to the Nuclear Structure 2014 Conference which will take place in Vancouver in July 2014 to defer student expenses. It will also provide a small amount of support to the 6th International Symposium on Symmetries in Subatomic Physics, which will be held in Victoria in 2015. The 50th Annual Canadian Undergraduate Physics Conference will be held October 23-26, 2014 at Queen’s University. The CINP is a silver sponsor.
The CAP Strategic Plan discussed in recent Council meetings was mentioned by ZP. In brief, its aims are to strengthen the profession, improve visibility, advocate for physics and physicists, and achieve organizational and operational excellence. CAP recently completed its Heads and Chairs survey of 41 departments and 760 faculty.
At the October 2013 Council meeting, the DNP bid for a plenary talk on neutrinoless double beta decay was unsuccessful. Many PPD and DTP joint sessions with the DNP were organized and ZP worked extremely well with the heads of those divisions in developing templates and methods that will assist similar efforts at future Congresses. Communication with CAP has improved tremendously since Danielle Legault joined the office. She is performing very well. The CERN Indico system was used to organize the program. The DNP had 18 sessions, of which 11 were managed, 4 were solo and 14 joint. The Erich Vogt memorial session was held at 13:45 on Thursday. The student competition at the Congress awards prizes of $200 and $100 for the best talks and $100 for the best poster. Next year’s Congress will be held in Edmonton.
Gordon Ball, the longtime experimental nuclear physics editor of the Canadian Journal of Physics, mentioned that very few Canadians submit to the journal and wondered if there was any point in continuing. The consensus appeared to be that it was not our division’s role to recommend whether we should continue or stop publishing in CJP. However, it was pointed out that this is a journal which we should consider when publishing.
RK mentioned that Physics in Canada (PiC) had a particle physics issue and wondered if we could do the same for nuclear physics. This would require a lead guest editor. It was suggested by GH that we should consider producing a PiC article summarizing the DNP physics at a Congress, something that had been tried once before and found worthwhile.
All business having been discussed, JD moved to adjourn the meeting circa 13:26.