Last week I attended the 3rd ATLAS Physics Workshop of the Americas, hosted by NYU, which is located in the Greenwich Village area of Manhattan. This workshop series is jointly organized by Canada, U.S and Latin America, and provides a good venue for collaborators based in the Americas to come together and find out about the latest happenings on ATLAS, talk to ATLAS management in a relaxed setting. This time there were about 140 people in attendance. There was a special poster session that gave graduate students and post-docs a great opportunity to discuss their work. We also had a town hall style meeting with the ATLAS spokesperson and the Physics Coordinator taking questions from the audience. Of course, there were some fun things too, e.g., one evening there was a reception, co-hosted by the New York Academy of Sciences; this was held on the 40th floor of a building in lower Manhattan. (Although views were great, the location was also a grim reminder of the world we live in. This building was right next to where the Twin Towers used to be).
I also spent a day taking in the sights of New York. One afternoon I took the No. 7 subway to “Little India” in Queens; most people on the subway were of Chinese, Korean, Indian (both from East and West Indies), and Hispanic descent. It struck me then that New York was such an apt place to hold an international workshop.
Now I am back at work in Indiana, trying to remember what I was doing before I left for New York!
— Vivek Jain, Indiana University
