Back and Better Than Before: Reconnecting After the COVID-19 Pandemic
In spring 2024, the Washington University in St. Louis (WashU) SPS chapter hosted the Zone 12 Meeting for the first time since 2008. This event marked a monumental turn for our chapter. Though we had thrived prior to the COVID-19 shutdown, the pandemic created a massive disconnect among students. As we resorted to virtual learning, the senior chapter leaders were forced to graduate without setting foot back on campus. This left the chapter jolted and unprepared.
Unfortunately, the hybrid learning structure of the 2020–21 school year made it difficult to recover. In 2022 we began to rebuild, hosting events such as a science center visit and a movie night. In 2023 we began engaging more with the student body, bringing in impressive crowds with our liquid nitrogen social event and SPS research panel. Shortly after this, we agreed to host the 2024 Zone 12 Meeting. Though nerves were high, we felt it was a good challenge.
Our goal for the first evening was to offer attendees a space to connect and unify before the next day’s full schedule. Fortunately, the attendees—students from Missouri University of Science and Technology, University of Missouri - St. Louis, and WashU—connected almost immediately. Conversations about classes, professors, and research topics flowed effortlessly. The night then shifted into high-spirited competition for a Jeopardy-style physics game.
The next morning started with a panel discussion on getting involved with research as an undergraduate. Then we moved into a talk by Professor Alex Chen on using computer simulations to develop a unified model that explains the multiwavelength observations of pulsars collected by astronomers since their 1967 discovery by then-graduate student Jocelyn Bell Burnell.
Next, attendees grabbed coffee and pastries while exploring research posters. Many of the conversations carried over into lunch, which was followed by a lively panel on graduate school and careers. After the panel, Professor Tansu Daylan talked about his research with the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). During Daylan’s long-time involvement with the mission, he has delivered more than 2,100 exoplanet candidates and worked on the detection and characterization of hundreds.
After Daylan’s talk we had a series of student talks. Graduate student Nicole Osborn discussed galactic cosmic ray research, and graduate student Garrett King discussed nuclear structure theory. Then T. Thomas, another undergrad, and I delivered back-to-back talks on supermassive black holes. I focused on the observational study of active galactic nuclei (AGN), supermassive black holes that reside at galactic centers and emit massive amounts of energy. Thomas delved into the theoretical side by discussing the use of computer simulations to test alternative theories of general relativity. Fellow undergraduate Tomás Salazar closed the session with a spirited and humorous lecture on discovering new exoplanet candidates.
The formal events concluded with a lecture from Professor Xi Wang, our SPS advisor. She delivered an enthusiastic talk on the quantum many-body interactions in moiré superlattices, a topic that lives on the frontier of the most cutting-edge quantum physics.
After a commemorative photo, the conference broke for dinner and closing remarks. We were delighted to hear a number of students express their enjoyment of the conference and inquire about future events and WashU opportunities.
After the attendees had departed, our Executive Board members held a toast and reflected on how far our chapter had come. Chapter secretary Macy Iyer recalled that she hadn’t heard of SPS until the previous fall’s liquid nitrogen event. I recalled not knowing that SPS existed until my sophomore year. However, SPS is once again a well-known and crucial component of the WashU physics department. The success of the Zone 12 Meeting proved that we’re back and on track to being better than ever before.
