Arab physicists launch professional society

On 7 April the Arab Physical Society (ArPS) kicked off with an all-day online event that featured talks by Jordan’s Prince El Hassan bin Talal, a longtime supporter of science, and a bevy of Nobel Prize winners and other prominent physicists from around the globe. The new society aims to promote “excellence and creativity in the field of physics for the benefit of the Arab region and humanity.”

Shaaban Khalil, a high-energy theorist and director of the Fundamental Physics Center at the Zewail City of Science and Technology in Egypt, is the society’s founding president. “We are filling some gaps,” he says. “I want the Arab Physical Society to be a bridge between physicists in different countries.”

The vision for the society is ambitious. It includes promoting excellence, innovative research, education, training, and technology transfer; encouraging joint projects and activities among Arab physicists; fostering relations with industry, government, and the public; promoting outreach and ethics; and strengthening the role of physical research in facing challenges and crises.

Each of the various ArPS governing bodies and steering committees has representatives from multiple countries and includes at least one-third women. An ArPS body called Focal Point will help implement activities suggested by the broader membership, Khalil says. Examples might be holding workshops or conferences and inviting students to work in different groups. “We all have dreams for our young people,” says Khalil.

Mariam Al-Maadeed, a materials scientist and vice president for research and graduate studies at Qatar University, is on the ArPS advisory committee. “The founding of the ArPS is a response to a rising awareness of the importance of science—and more specifically physics—in almost all fields of life,” she says.

Wafaa Khater is a high-energy physicist and dean of the science faculty at Birzeit University in Palestine and a member of the ArPS Focal Point committee. At this stage of her career, she says, “it’s important for me to network with colleagues from other Arab countries and learn about their work and expertise.”

Khater is the only woman on her physics faculty, but she notes that more than 75% of physics students in her department are women. It is common in Arab countries for women to outnumber men at the undergraduate level in physics. In Oman, says Sameen Ahmed Khan, an associate professor at Dhofar University whose research area is mathematical physics, women’s enrollment and their performance is “much higher than that of men for most disciplines.” Hanan Sa’adeh, an associate professor of atomic and molecular physics at the University of Jordan, says that roughly 80% of the students in her department are women, and the vast majority become teachers. “Studying basic sciences is not financially rewarding in our region of the world,” says Sa’adeh, who joined ArPS after hearing about it on the news.

Men are more likely to go into engineering or medicine than into basic sciences, Khater agrees, “because they are expected to support their families.” For cultural and socioeconomic reasons, few women continue to the PhD level and beyond, she adds. “We hope that ArPS will contribute to promoting the role of women in physics,” Khater says, “and show examples of well-established women physicists as role models for female students.”

After earning her PhD in Jordan in 2010, Sa’adeh struggled to build connections. “You can’t do science alone. I hope that ArPS will serve my students. I don’t want them to suffer from being invisible.” Beyond helping with networking, she hopes that ArPS will eventually provide financial support to send researchers to conferences, train students, and the like.

An attempt nearly 50 years ago to form a physical society in the region didn’t pan out. This time, Khalil and his co-organizers are determined to succeed. “The younger generation approached senior physicists in online meetings during COVID-19 and asked us to establish this,” he says. “First, we need to convince our colleagues from different countries to think seriously about societies and what an important role the society could play.” As of early June, ArPS had more than 500 members, based in about two dozen Arab countries and in Europe and North America.

Besides building membership, a major challenge will be raising money, Khalil says. “We need to convince organizations in the Arab world to take the ArPS seriously and provide financial support.” Khalil notes that the €50 ($53) membership fee is automatically waived for students and for physicists in low-income countries such as Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. “Someone told me that the annual dues are equivalent to a half-month’s salary in Syria,” he says. “We don’t want money to get in the way of membership.”