New CEO aims to invigorate and connect AIP

Robert Brown took the helm of the American Institute of Physics (AIP) on 1 June. He succeeds H. Frederick Dylla, who led the institute for eight years (see Physics Today, February 2007, page 28 ). Brown came to AIP from the Southern California offices of the aerospace and defense company Rockwell Collins, the latest stop in a career that includes decades as a researcher focusing on optics and photonics and four years as the editorial director at the Institute of Physics in the UK.

The not-for-profit AIP has 109 employees and an annual budget of $25 million. It is a federation of 10 physical sciences societies and is the publisher of Physics Today. AIP Publishing, a wholly owned subsidiary, publishes 18 print and 3 online journals.

For his 1973 undergraduate degree at the University of London, Brown concentrated on optical interferometry. After a stint at a telecommunications company, he went to work at the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment—sometimes dubbed “the Bell Labs of Malvern”—and along the way earned his PhD in engineering at the University of Surrey in 1983. He describes the 1970s as “one of the most exciting times in experimental light scattering and quantum optics that we have ever had. We were counting, correlating, and looking in detail at the statistical properties of light for the very first time.”

Brown says that his 40 years of experience in research, industry, and academia and at the Institute of Physics make the top job at AIP “the perfect confluence at this time in my life. Physics is the basis of everything around us, and I really want to help lead and steer the ship, to make it ever more effective and grow it as we move forward.”

His interests in optoelectronics and in technology transfer permeate his career. Brown ticks off examples of advances in the field—the transistor, the laser, LEDs, optical fibers. “It’s all basic physics, and it’s in every device we use,” he says. “That’s a testament to just how important photons are to everything that all of us do every day. I still find that very exciting.” (For more about Brown’s background and his plans at AIP, see the interview in the Singularities department of Physics Today’s online Daily Edition.)

As part of a larger goal to recruit young people to the physical sciences, Brown wants AIP to better exploit Facebook, Twitter, and other social media. “I definitely want to be focused on building those out and enhancing them, creating new ways of using those media to connect with physical scientists,” he says. “We must impedance match to our audience.”

Brown also wants AIP to put a “renewed and reimagined emphasis” on the member societies with an eye to doing the “utmost to support their activities.” The idea, he says, is to provide societies “with new features, new functionalities, and a new attractiveness.” Member societies should look at what AIP has to offer and decide “we have to belong to AIP because it will help us advance our mission and better serve our membership. We’ll be a lot worse off if we are not a member,” he says.

“Those two items are really my initial platform for the first six months to a year,” says Brown. A related goal of his is to develop ties between AIP and virtual physical sciences groups that have self-organized online. And he wants to strengthen AIP’s international presence. “Our whole cohort of physical sciences is essentially a global community,” he says. “I am starting to strategize about how we can develop electronics communications to augment what we already do at AIP. This is again for the benefit of the member societies. We can raise their visibility and their impact on a global level.”

Brown expects that the biggest challenge in his new job will be convincing people to invest limited resources in new ideas. “Changing hearts and minds is always difficult for any organization. I will have challenges in convincing my colleagues that we need to move in new directions, that we need to reinvent ourselves” so that AIP remains “vital and vibrant.”

For his part, Dylla plans to get back to writing a book on the history of vacuum science that he started before he came to AIP. He has other writing plans too. “I will probably dabble in lay science articles, history of science, vignettes,” he says. But he has more on his plate than dabbling: Dylla will stay involved in AIP Publishing as an adviser on open-access publishing policy.