WHAT IS CUWiP?

Encouraging physics students

CUWiP is a yearly event which aims to assist undergraduate women who study physics.  To do this, CUWiP gives them the opportunity to attend a professional conference where they can network with other women in physics (fellow undergraduates included) and learn about potential graduate programs and professions in physics. 

The first CUWiP took place in 2006 at the University of Southern California.  Since then, it has been a yearly effort, with the list host institutions changing and growing each time.  In 2011, CUWiP affiliated itself with APS to access institutional resources and organizational support.  The 2020 conference will take place in 13 locations in the USA and Canada. 

Main CUWiP Page @ APS

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CUWiP has become incredibly popular. In order to maximize the number of CUWiP participants we can accommodate, we will allocate participants to sites based on travel logistics and site capacity. We will aim to follow the distributions outlined below, but may have to make adjustments. Please do not purchase travel or plan to be at a specific site until you receive an email confirming you have been accepted to a specific CUWiP site!

Visit the other regional websites:

1. Black Hills State University
2. University of Minnesota
3. The University of Chicago
4. Yale University

5. Washington State University
​6. University of California Irvine
7. Texas A&M University
8. The University of Oklahoma

9. University of South Florida
10. University of Maryland / NIST
12. Carnegie Mellon University
13. University of Toronto

Keynote Speaker

Andrea Liu is a theoretical soft and living matter physicist who received her A. B. and Ph.D. degrees in physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and Cornell University, respectively.  She was a faculty member in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCLA for ten years before joining the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania in 2004. Liu is currently Speaker-Elect of the Council of the American Physical Society (APS) and Chair-Elect of the Physics Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). She is a fellow of the APS, AAAS and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Plenary Speakers

Laura Lopez Assistant Professor of Astronomy at Ohio State University

Laura Lopez is an assistant professor of astronomy at The Ohio State University (OSU) in Columbus, OH. She earned her SB in physics from MIT in 2004 and her PhD in Astronomy & Astrophysics from University of California Santa Cruz in 2011. Subsequently, she was a NASA Einstein Postdoctoral Fellow and Pappalardo Fellow in Physics at MIT from 2011-2014, a NASA Hubble Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics from 2014-2015, and joined the astronomy faculty at OSU in 2015. Professor Lopez's research focuses on the birth and death of stars using telescopes across the electromagnetic spectrum. She is an appointed member of the Science and Technology Definition Team of the Lynx X-ray Observatory, and she has served on the leadership of the High-Energy Astrophysics Division of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) since 2015. Professor Lopez is deeply committed to diversity/inclusion: she served on the AAS Committee on the Status of Minorities in Astronomy for ten years, is expanding the American Physical Society Bridge Program to astronomy at OSU, and has led national demographic studies on participation and retention of under-represented groups in astronomy/astrophysics.

John Perdew Laura H. Carnell Professor of Physics and Chemistry, Temple University

​I received a Ph.D. in condensed matter theory from Cornell, and was a postdoc for six years at Toronto and Rutgers before starting a faculty position at Tulane. In 2011, I was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. In 2013, I moved to Temple, where I am the Director of a Temple-based DOE Energy Frontier Research Center, with a major 
component of theory and computation.  My research has been in the fundamentals and  approximations of the density functional theory for materials and molecules. A successful career in physics requires strong interest and focus, but it is also shaped by some odd coincidences. I 
will give some examples from my own experience.

WHAT WILL YOU LEARN?

Navigating the modern world of physics

CUWiP is more than simply a display of ​passion for physics.  It's a chance for the up-and-coming physicists of the world (that's you!) to network with one another and their elders.  But perhaps most importantly, it's a space for women and gender minorities to get advice from people like them about how to survive and thrive in a field that has historically been dominated and gate-kept by men.  At CUWiP, you will meet, listen to, and connect with people who are facing or have faced challenges similar to those you deal with or may encounter in the future.  

See the Conference Agenda!

Sponsors

These conferences are supported in part by the National Science Foundation (PHY-1346627) and by the Department of Energy Office of Science (DE-SC0011076).  Further details are available on the APS conference website.