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”