Q&A with IPAC’24 Organizing Committee Chair
A world pandemic has come and gone since ORNL’s Fulvia Pilat began working on IPAC’24 six years ago. Indeed, COVID-19 altered how we connect professionally and socially. In this discussion, Pilat describes the reason for IPAC and the journey to organize a conference of this size.
Pilat is the Research Accelerator Division Director in ORNL’s Neutron Sciences Directorate and the IPAC’24 Organizing Committee Chair. She is also a Fellow of the American Physical Society and has served as the Chair of the APS Division of Particle Beams, the Chair of the IEEE PAST Committee and a member of HEPAP. She has served as a chair and reviewer for multiple Department of Energy, National Science Foundation and international review committees.
Science lives on new ideas. And just like a shark, if you don’t swim, you don’t breathe. Accelerator physics is not a 9-to-5 job and you must have new endeavors to motivate people.
IPAC has a lot of historical depth. In the early 1960s, the accelerator conference community was very small. On an international scale, the community had yet to get together. Fast forward 20 years and Europe and Asia began organizing their particle accelerator conferences. The community realized that having three separate conferences each year was not sustainable. They also recognized that accelerator physics is something you must engage in to know what projects are needed. IPAC is where you can access all the latest and greatest scientific products and programs for accelerator physics.
They came together and merged the conferences based on a memorandum of understanding, which happened in 2010 with the first IPAC in Japan.
Having an opportunity for the entire community to meet, from leaders to students and mid-career, where you bump into people between talks and at poster sessions or at conference social events — this is an incredible benefit.
We need stewardship about minimizing travel and its impacts. There is no doubt about this. But there are few substitutes for human connection. We’ve all attended a lot of virtual meetings and they are extremely effective for certain kinds of collaborations and exchanges of information. They do not, however, replace the interactions you get in person.
In fact, I would say the entire premise of this large conference is human connection. Quite frankly, if you intend to foster collaboration among labs and nations, there’s no substitute for building relationships. We would be hard-pressed to count the number of impactful projects that have emerged from IPACs over the years. And we are not just talking about the exchange of ideas among scientists for the evolution of basic science. Industrial exhibitors also attend and have opportunities to directly discuss industry needs with scientists.
The Spallation Neutron Source is coming of age this spring. We are finishing the Proton Power Upgrade project, so it will be great timing to showcase the project, the accelerator and SNS achievements.
I am also eager to see all the final details come together for this IPAC. It is one thing to attend as a guest and another to host.
When we originally made the bid in 2019 to host the conference, it came down to Oak Ridge and Brookhaven National Lab. But New York doesn’t have to be sold. Everybody knows New York, right? And Wolfram Fischer did a great job presenting his case to the committee.
But I heavily promoted Nashville — even showed up in my cowgirl boots — as something different and unexpected. The committee voted and Oak Ridge won the bid. But Wolfram and I had a deal. We agreed to help each other regardless of who won the bid. The winner would chair the conference committee and the other would organize the scientific program. So, Brookhaven is handling that aspect and they are doing an outstanding job. Attendees are in for a lot of scientific treats.
But COVID certainly threw everything for a loop. We set up our contract at the end of 2019 with IEEE and the hotel. And we all know what started in January 2020. Everything went into limbo for years because there was no industry. There were no conventions. Even Music City Center in Nashville was temporarily converted into an overflow for the hospital.
But, luckily, we came out of the pandemic and Nashville is booming more than ever.
