“I thought the attendance fees were high considering APS did not have to pay to use a conference center with lots of rooms,” says Cherrill Spencer, a retired SLAC physicist. However, some attendees were surprised by how much it cost to register. Others said that because they work in industries or fields tangential to physics, they would not be able to use travel funds to attend, but they could justify the online registration fee, which at full price was about $200 less than the in-person meeting fee last year.Ĭlaudia Fracchiolla, APS’s head of public engagement, points out that in many ways going virtual made the meeting more inclusive. Indeed, many international attendees mentioned to Physics Today that one strength of the virtual meeting was that they didn’t have to apply for a visa or incur travel costs. We thought attendance would be down from a face-to-face meeting.” “We had 13 090 register and 12 412 unique visitors who logged in and attended the meeting,” says Hunter Clemens, APS’s director of meetings.

Despite a lack of funding and other significant problems caused by the pandemic, international attendance was up 5% from 2019, and the 2021 event turned out to be one of the most popular yet. The home page for the 2021 APS March Meeting.Īfter the sudden cancellation of the American Physical Society’s March Meeting last year, this year’s event went virtual.