Appointment of Silvina Ponce Dawson as Acting President Designate

After Kennedy Reed’s resignation as our President, our previous President Designate, Michel Spiro, became our new President, leaving IUPAP without a President Designate.  The Executive Council felt that the Union would not function so well with a Presidential Line of only two people.

The Council was pleased that Silvina Ponce Dawson, currently our Gender Champion and Vice President at Large, agreed to be nominated by the President to the position of President Designate for the period October 2020 to late 2022, and appointed her as the Acting President Designate until the General Assembly elects a President Designate in October 2020.

Silvina started her work with IUPAP as a member of the Working Group on Women in Physics (WG5).  She was the Chair of WG5 in 2011-2014. At the 2017 GA she was elected Vice-President at Large with Gender Champion Duties for the period 2017-2020. She is one of the IUPAP representatives on the Executive Committee of the Gender Gap in STEM Project (https://gender-gap-in-science.org/), a project that received one of the 3 large grants given by the International Science Council (then ICSU) in 2016.

Silvina Ponce Dawson received her PhD from the University of Buenos Aires in 1988 in theoretical plasma physics and is known for her work on statistical, nonlinear and biological physics.  She was Director of the Physics Department of the School of Exact and Natural Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires in 2005-2009. She is currently Full Professor at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina and Principal Researcher of the Argentinian National Research Council, CONICET. She is Senior Associate of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste and Associate Member of the ICTP South American Institute for Fundamental Research (ICTP-SAIFR) in São Paulo, Brazil.

The Executive Council is confident that the three person Presidential Line, of Past President, President and Acting President Designate we have a strong leadership team, incorporating geographical diversity and gender balance, to lead IUPAP through the challenges which lie ahead.