This award supports participants to attend a "Gordon Conference" on the complex intersection of Physics and Biology with respect to both research and education. The fields of biological physics and the physics education of biology and other biological-science students have experienced tremendous growth in recent years. New findings, applications, and technologies in biological physics are having far reaching consequences that affect and influence the science community, the education of future scientists and biotechnology workers, and the general population.
The Gordon Conferences have a long and rich history of serving as the key meeting places for many important researchers in science over the years. This conference brings together biologists, biophysicists, physicists, physics teachers, physics education researchers, textbook authors, biology education researchers and biology teachers, as well as graduate and undergraduate student researchers in these fields, to discuss connections between, and how students learn, these disciplines. The focus topic is timely as textbooks are being written and new courses and laboratories are being developed and implemented, not to mention the publication of Bio2010 and its calls for a strong interdisciplinary curriculum that includes physical science. Because of the large number of biology students taking introductory physics, and the fact that most of these courses do not support the needs of these students, there is a great potential for this conference to have deep impact.
The Gordon Research Conference on PHYSICS RESEARCH & EDUCATION was held at Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA. The Conference was well-attended with 125 participants (attendees list attached). The attendees represented the spectrum of endeavor in this field coming from academia, industry, and government laboratories, both U.S. and foreign scientists, senior researchers, young investigators, and students. Of the 125 attendees, 92 voluntarily responded to a general inquiry regarding ethnicity which appears on our registration forms. Of the 92 respondents, 10% were Minorities – 3% Hispanic, 4% Asian and 3% African American. Approximately 34 % of the participants at the 2014 meeting were women. In designing the formal speakers program, emphasis was placed on current unpublished research and discussion of the future target areas in this field. There was a conscious effort to stimulate lively discussion about the key issues in the field today. Time for formal presentations was limited in the interest of group discussions. In order that more scientists could communicate their most recent results, poster presentation time was scheduled. Attached is a copy of the formal schedule and speaker program and the poster program. In addition to these formal interactions, "free time" was scheduled to allow informal discussions. Such discussions are fostering new collaborations and joint efforts in the field.
