Informal Science Education and Career Advancement

This document supports a proposed APS statement that encourages academic, research, and other institutions to add the participation in informal science education activities to the criteria they use for hiring and career advancement decisions. There is a prevalent attitude that the time spent by a researcher on these activities takes time away from research efforts that are more valued by their peers and their institution. To change this mindset, we enumerate the many benefits of informal science education activities to the public, to researchers, to their institutions, and to the field of physics. We also suggest aspects of these activities that may be considered by institutions in evaluating informal educational efforts for recruitment and career advancement decisions.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.10623

Authors: Michael S. Smith,1,∗ Claudia Fracchiolla,2,† Sean Fleming,3 Arturo Dominguez,4 Alexandra Lau,2 Shannon Greco,4 Don Lincoln,5 Eleni Katifori,6 William Ratcliff,7 Maria Longobardi,8 Maajida Murdock,9 and Mustapha Ishak,10

1Physics Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, 37831-6354, USA American Physical Society, 1 Physics Ellipse, College Park, MD, 20740-3844, USA 3College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, Oregon State university, Corvallis, OR, 97331, USA; Department of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada; and National Water and Climate Center, Natural Resources Conservation Service, US Department of Agriculture, Portland, OR, 97232, USA 4Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, 100 Stellarator Rd, Princeton, NJ, 08540, USA 5Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia, Illinois, 60510, USA 6Department of Physics & Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania, 209 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104-6396, USA 7NIST, 100 Bureau Dr., Gaithersburg, MD, 20889, USA and Dept. of Materials Science, Univ. of Maryland, College Park, MD, 20742, USA 8University of Basel, Department of Physics, Basel, Switzerland 9Dept of Physics & Engineering Physics, Morgan State University, 1700 East Cold Spring Lane, Baltimore, MD, 21251, USA 10Department of Physics, The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX, 75080, USA

White Paper in support of proposed public statement for APS.