Off-shore HEP and University Departments
Within a few years, all of the large U.S. collider programs will be completed and literally half of all U.S. HEP experimentalists will be working on one of the LHC experiments.
Does this have ramifications for how HEP will be viewed within your physics department? Will it enhance or reduce the interest that future graduate students will have in HEP? Are you comfortable that you can maintain the sort of visibility within your department that you and your colleagues might have enjoyed in the past?
Comments
Traditionally, US Unversity Junior Faculty on experiments at US National Labs have been able to teach and travel to these National Labs for a couple of days each week or or at least once per month. An overseas experiment requires a Junior Faculty member to miss classes in order to be at the experiment and possibly to get semesters off from teaching in order to have a major presence. Are there sufficient options available for junior faculty at Universities to do this or should we consider having programs to assist junior faculty to spend extended visits at CERN?
Posted by: Wesley Smith | October 30, 2006 11:09 AM
This problem is not unique to junior faculty working at CERN. There are a significant number of US junior faculty working in the Japanese neutrino effort, to pick one other example.
Support could be modest for such a program. For example, such a program could offering incentives for departments to offer flexible teaching arrangements (double teaching followed by leave) to such junior faculty.
Posted by: Kevin McFarland | October 30, 2006 01:54 PM
Within the University, there is no question that the HEP group's main product being overseas does not help visibility and perceived "ownership" of the effort. Can the collaborations and our current national research support infrastructure (mostly at national labs) be brought to bear on this problem?
For example, the Fermilab public affairs office currently does an excellent job of writing and distributing scientific press releases to local Universities so that a local story can be generated in a national context if appropriate. Here's an example from the recent Sigma_B Baryon observation at CDF: FNAL release, University release featuring an undergraduate student at University of Rochester who worked on a related project.
Can this model be extended to offshore programs?
Posted by: Kevin McFarland | October 31, 2006 09:50 AM