UW-Stout Professor Laura McCullough, chemistry and physics, was recently elected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a prestigious honor from her peers for her outstanding contributions to the field and “sustained, significant, and impactful research on and service toward promoting gender equity in physics.”
The American Physical Society (APS) is 150 years old and is considered the main international physics society. “It’s the powerhouse of physics societies, and its work covers an extremely wide scope,” McCullough said.
APS helps physicists connect with colleagues and collaborate across more than 30 fields and subfields, including astrophysics, atomic and molecular physics, nuclear physics, data science, energy research, medical physics, quantum information and climate physics. Units also cover a breadth of topics, including public policy, history, physics education research and more.
McCullough is one of four fellows chosen by the APS Forum on Diversity and Inclusion this year. She was honored for her career’s work on improving the physics climate for women and other minoritized groups. “By making physics more welcoming to everyone, physics as a field becomes better. And that is good for society as a whole,” she said.
McCullough has taught at UW-Stout, Wisconsin’s Polytechnic University, for 25 years. “Within STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), there is so much more awareness now of the importance of diversity. When I gave my first presentation on women in physics in 1996, it was the first such research of that type. My publications on women in STEM leadership are some of the first ever in that field. So much more work has been done since then. It makes me very hopeful,” she said.
McCullough’s applied research doesn’t focus on figuring out the underlying causes of systemic discrimination but rather on the theories that inspire actions to make a difference, from research on gender bias to chairing the APS climate site visits program.
“I look back and see how different the world is from when I started. I’ve always identified as a teacher first, physicist second. Technology has made such a difference in both disciplines. Students have much more going on and are having more mental health issues, so I’ve become much more flexible. I’ve realized the importance of meeting students where they are. The classroom is about them, not me or what I hope they learn. Physics has always had a bad reputation for being hard, and I feel that attitude is diminishing. My students are more accepting when I say that everyone can learn physics. I love that,” she said.
Each year, APS Fellow nominees represent fewer than 0.5% of the society’s total membership. McCullough was nominated by Jennifer Blue of Miami University, Ohio, and Charles Henderson at North Carolina State. The process was started by Ramon Barthelemy at University of Utah.
McCullough received the Universities of Wisconsin Teaching Excellence Award in 2022 and the American Association of Physics Teachers’ Homer L. Dodge Citation for Distinguished Service to AAPT in 2019.
UW-Stout’s chemistry and physics department offers undergraduate degrees in biochemistry and molecular biology, applied science, chemistry, environmental science, and physics, as well as minors in chemistry, environmental health, materials science and physics.
