The University of Iowa Department of Physics and Astronomy hosted the Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics  January 20-22. The UI conference is sponsored by the American Physical Society (APS) 12 other universities and one laboratory across the United States.

Georgia Nissen a Junior Physics Major at Wartburg College said, “An issue that is there is the fact that there aren’t a lot of people in my institution that are like women in physics that I can look up to.”

University of Iowa Grad Student Samantha Pedek who also spoke at the conference said, “The visibility of women in physics the more that people, all people see what other people are doing including women seeing other women doing great things just the more normalized it’s going to be and the less I guess stigma that there’s going to be about science in general.”

Georgia Nissen also said “It was really cool I only have like one other girl in my physics class right now at my college and so like to talk to see all of these other people who are in similar situations it’s kind of like we have this little community and like this little connection and so it was really cool to see everybody here I’ve really taken that I’m not alone in this and there are a lot of people that I can reach out to and I could reach out to nearly everybody and nearly everybody is going to come help and do what they can to support me.”

There were also conferences held at:

Argonne National Laboratory, Auburn University, Boston University, Brown University, Cornell University & Ithaca College, Pennsylvania State University, Princeton University/PPPL, Texas Christian University, University of California, Merced, University of California, Santa Cruz, University of Central Florida, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and the University of Washington.