Mailing undergraduate lab experiments to students stuck at home, how to run a physics conference on Zoom - Physics World

This episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast features three physicists at McMaster University in Canada. They responded to COVID-19 restrictions on in-person learning by mailing-out simple equipment so their students could do undergraduate lab experiments at home. Instead of just getting by with the new arrangements, Sara Cormier, Adam Fortais and Kari Dalnoki-Veress were delighted to find that their students learned new skills working at home and often did experiments with family members – giving physics a wider audience in the community.

Dalnoki-Veress also explains how he and his co-organizers of the Soft Matter Canada Symposium scrambled to put the event online after it was cancelled earlier this month. Again, much to the organizers’ delight, the Zoom-based event grew from a symposium into the much larger Soft Matter Canada Conference as more and more people signed-up to participate. Indeed, the organizers now hope to hold the online event several times a year.

You can contact Dalnoki-Veress at kdalnokiveress@gmail.com to find out about the next Soft Matter event.