This spring FinDiP is renewing our board. We are looking for new board members and new ideas for national-level activities and diversity engagement. We are particularly keen to include colleagues from different Finnish universities and support the physics diversity and wellbeing groups operating locally.

If you would like to know more, feel free to contact any of the board members for information. We will meet on Monday 16 May at 2pm to discuss the new board and initiatives, and you can get in touch with (for example) Tuuli Miinalainen for the Zoom link.

Physics Days 2022, a seminar organized by the Finnish Physical Society, will be held as a virtual meeting on 2.-4.3.2022.

FinDiP is organizing a session on diversity and non-discrimination themes. Our session is one of the parallel sessions A, and is held on Wednesday 2nd March at 14.30.

During our session, we’ll have Jukka Tanskanen from the Academy of Finland to present the Academy of Finland’s action plan for promoting equality and non-discrimination. Following that, there will be short diversity-themed presentations from physics departments at Finnish universities. After those, we’ll have an open discussion on diversity in physics in Finland.

In addition, there will a plenary talk given by professor Michael Ramsey-Musolf from T.D. Lee Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University and University of Massachusetts Amherst on the same day, Wednesday 2nd March at 16.30. The title of the talk is Shattering the Lavender Ceiling: A Gay Theoretical Physicist’s Perspective. An abstract for the presentation can be found from here.

Participation is free of charge. However, remember to register by the 25th Feb at: https://physicsdays2022.aalto.fi/registration/

At Physics Days 2021 we are organising a Special Session on Diversity. If you’re attending Physics Days, be sure to join us on Wednesday 24th March at 13.30. Our special session is titled Boosting creative science through diversity and wellbeing.

We will first have a talk by Professor Tomas Brage [he/him] from Lund University, Sweden, titled What does Gender have to do with Physics? His talk will be followed by a panel discussion on the topic Concrete measures for a creative and diverse workplace. Our panelists are:

• Christian Flindt (Aalto, associate professor, he/him)
  
• Jyrki Saarinen (UEF, head of department, he/him)
  
• Saga Säppi (Trento, Italy, postdoc, she/her)
  
• Niyati Venkatesan (JYU, PhD student, she/they)
  
• Annele Virtanen (UEF, professor, she/her)

For more information, please check out the session page on the Physics Days website! Please join us, it is sure to be a really interesting event.

Update 11.5.2021: Please find Tomas Brage’s slides here.

This year, the Nordic Network for Diversity in Physics is holding its annual meeting as a one-day online event on 29th January.

There are two exciting keynote speakers:

• Ilona Riipinen is a professor at Stockholm University in the Department of Environmental Science. She works on the behaviour and motions of aerosol particles in the environment. Her talk, “What do we know about aerosols” looks set to be an interesting introduction to the latest research on this important, and complex topic.

  

• Angela Saini is a British journalist whose highly-regarded books and broadcasts on important issues around representation and discrimination in science and society have received widespread praise. She will speak on “Racism in science and society”. This is a topic that Angela researched extensively for her book Superior: The Return of Race Science – which I strongly recommend reading if you get the chance. It is relevant to the Finnish experience as well, and indeed discusses the work researchers based here in Finland.

In addition there will be reports on harassment reporting practices and a round table discussion.

There’s still time to register! It promises to be a great event.

Our new board member Indrani Bhattacharya wrote an article for Photonics Finland‘s magazine Fotoni about the important role women have played in the development of that subfield. The original article is not yet available online but we include its text here until we can link directly to the publication.

Continue reading “Fotoni feature: Women in Photonics”

In 2020 it was not possible to hold the FinDiP annual meeting during the Physics Days (cancelled), so we had a digital call for new FinDiP board. We received several excellent applications from physicists of different genders, home institutions and career stages. We were please to bring all of them on board this year!

Now our board starts to reflect the kind of diversity we would like to see in our workplace. We will be planning new national activities this year, and connecting more to our community at all career stages. A major aim for this year is to support the emerging diversity activities in physics departments across Finland: see our current national network info page.

FinDiP is run by a small board of researchers interested in diversity issues. People on the board change every year, though it is common that some board members stay to help with continuity, advice and technical issues. The board meets every few months to touch ground and plan new initiatives. At the Physics Days Annual Meeting, we were going to discuss with potential new board members, but now we will do this electronically. If you are interested in joining the FinDiP board, we would love to hear from you!

Please use this link to tell us a bit about yourself and how you would like to contribute to FinDiP. If you are not sure about it or have questions, write to us and we can clarify. If you worry about the work involved, know that you will be supported. We hope to build a diverse board, with members who are male/female/other, Finnish/foreign, junior/senior, nationally diverse and with good ideas. We will wait to hear from you for one month, until 30 April 2020, so keep in touch.

Strange times for our community and society, as much of the world slows down to flatten the COVID-19 curve. Our colleagues are juggling remote work with kids activities and looking after the elderly. We hope you are staying safe and keeping sane!

Meanwhile, FPS activities go digital: the annual meeting was held electronically on 26 March. Likewise, we post the materials from our FinDiP annual meeting here. Read our Annual Report 2019 to hear all about our activities and engagements in the past year. This is an exciting time for us: we achieved a lot in the past year, and we can still do so much more for our community nationally and abroad.

An important part of the annual meeting is the discussion of the FinDiP leadership, and we have to do this electronically. We now extend an invite to all colleagues interested in joining the FinDiP board to get in touch.  We would love to hear from you: young or old, male or female, Finnish or foreign. If you have ideas for us and would like to get involved in national diversity activities, let us know. We are accepting nominations for the FinDiP board until 30 April.

With the restriction on large gatherings in place, the Finnish Physics Days 2020 have been cancelled. We are making plans to bring our session “Boosting Creative Science Through Diversity and Wellbeing” online. More information to follow soon!

FinDiP will host a range of activities at the upcoming Physics Days in Kuopio (17-19 March), all of them taking place on Wednesday,  18th of March.

• FinDiP annual meeting will be held 12-13h, during the lunch break. Participants can get free lunch provided by the organizers and join us for the meeting. We will be summarizing activities during the past year, and planning for the upcoming year, which also means selecting the annual leadership.
• Our parallel session “Boosting Creative Science Through Diversity and Wellbeing” will be held 14.30-16h. Prof. Tomas Brage (SE) will give an invited talk “What does gender got to do with physics“. In continuation, we will host a panel discussion on “Concrete measures for a creative and diverse workplace”. All participants will be able to ask questions about possible measures and plans to our panelists, who currently include Prof. Emilia Kilpua (UH),  Prof. Tomas Brage (Lund, SE), Prof. Vesa-Pekka Lehto (UEF) and Prof. Ari Jokinen (JYU).
• The poster session will be held 16-18h. Several posters will address the topic of diversity, inclusivity and wellbeing, and we will have a chance to continue our discussion there.

We encourage all interested colleagues to download the flyer for these events and advertise at their local institutions before the event. All are welcome!