Fermi National Laboratory


New UEC Chair focuses on visa crisis
Sharon Hagopian's "State of the UEC" Comments
Sharon Hagopian "The work that the UEC does in organizing communications with the U.S. Congress, both by mail and yearly trips, in conjunction with the SLAC users group, is of great importance. I think that efforts by past UEC members over several years had some effect in getting an increase in the NSF budget for physical sciences for FY03 and increases in the proposed FY04 budget. Efforts on behalf of the DOE Office of Science have helped bring positive comments and increases in the House and Senate Appropriation bills, although the actual 2004 budget is uncertain at this time. But continuing efforts have a cumulative effect, and I want to push for budget increases both for the NSF physical sciences and DOE Office of Science. The deleterious effect of delays and sometimes rejection of visas for graduate students, post docs, and senior scientists is a crisis that must be solved before international scientific collaboration has sustained permanent damage. The UEC is working very hard with user groups from other laboratories to make progress in this area. The UEC also serves to improve the quality of life for users at Fermilab, so that they can be happy, productive physicists. It is a conduit of outreach both for the public and for the government. The UEC supports the Fermilab users in developing future directions for the lab and for the HEP community. The UEC, together with the GSA, helps to find ways to increase the visibility and further the careers of young physicists in a time when increasing collaboration size is changing the sociology of experiments. The UEC works very hard for the Fermilab Users community and I am proud to be a part of this effort."



last modified 9/23/2003   email Fermilab

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