The American Physical Society (APS) held its Conferences for Undergraduate Women in Physics (CUWiP) during the last week. The three-day regional events for undergraduate physics majors took place Friday, January 17 through Sunday afternoon, January 19, 2020.

Some of the college sites included Black Hills State University, Carnegie Mellon University, Temple University Texas A&M University, College Station, University of California, Irvine, University of Chicago, University of Maryland, College Park/NIST, University of Minnesota, University of Oklahoma, University of South Florida, Washington State University, and Yale University.

On its website, the APS says a typical program will include research talks by faculty, panel discussions about graduate school and careers in physics, presentations and discussions about women in physics, laboratory tours, student research talks, a student poster session, and several meals during which presenters and students interact with each other.

At Yale, the annual APS Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics, or CUWiP, was held on Science Hill and drew more than 200 women in STEM together to connect, educate and lean on each other as they navigate the world of physics. According to Yale Daily News, the event also addressed the well-documented retention problem with women in the field and encouraged underrepresented minorities to enter science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).

According to most recent figures from the American Institute of Physics, women only earn 21 percent of physics bachelor’s degrees and 20 percent of physics doctorates, the article stated. Over the past decade, these figures have resolutely remained unchanged, according to the institute, despite the increasing number of women enrolling in physics graduate programs.

Jami Valentine (photo) launched the African American Women in Physics (AAWIP) website to highlight these problems.

“As the only African American in the department at the time, I felt very isolated. I wanted to know that there were other Black women who had done this before me,” Dr. Valentine says.

Valentine was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University and the first African-American woman to earn a Ph.D. in physics from Johns Hopkins when she first thought of launching the AAWIP website.