Frederick Lamb, chair elect of the APS Forum on Physics and Society

Illinois Physics Research Professor Frederick Lamb  is currently serving as the 2022 chair-elect of the American Physical Society (APS) Forum on Physics and Society (FPS). Founded in the late 1960s and incorporated as the very first APS forum in 1972, FPS members work to better understand, analyze, inform the public, and advise government officials on societal issues relating to science, including climate change, proliferation of nuclear weapons, and national security. Lamb was was elected to the leadership line of the FPS in 2020 and served as vice-chair in 2021. He will go on to serve as the chair in 2023, and the past chair in 2024.

Among Lamb’s goals as a leader of the Forum are to help increase understanding of important science-policy issues by members of the APS and society at large. These include how best to address the COVID-19 pandemic, the growing climate emergency, and the dangerous new upward spiral of the nuclear arms race. Other issues Lamb is seeking to help FPS address are the need for renewable energy sources, the vital importance of increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion in science and our society generally, and a growing disregard of facts and the understanding provided by science.

At Illinois, Lamb is the Brand and Monica Fortner Endowed Chair of Theoretical Astrophysics emeritus and a core faculty member in the Program on Arms Control, Disarmament, and International Security. Lamb has made seminal contributions to atomic physics and to high-energy and relativistic astrophysics. He played a leading role in NASA’s Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer mission and is currently a member of the Science Team of NASA’s Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) mission.

With more than 40 year’s experience working to advance national and international security, Lamb is also an expert on space policy, military uses of space, ballistic missiles, missile defenses, anti-satellite weapons, and the technical aspects of nuclear test bans, verification of arms control agreements, and nuclear nonproliferation.

Read Lamb’s national security biographical sketch here.