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New UEC Chair focuses on visa crisis Sharon Hagopian's "State of the UEC" Comments 
"The work that the UEC does in organizing communications with the U.S.
Congress, both by mail and yearly trips, in conjunction with the SLAC
users group, is of great importance. I think that efforts by past UEC
members over several years had some effect in getting an increase in
the NSF budget for physical sciences for FY03 and increases in the proposed
FY04 budget. Efforts on behalf of the DOE Office of Science have helped bring
positive comments and increases in the House and Senate Appropriation bills,
although the actual 2004 budget is uncertain at this time. But continuing
efforts have a cumulative effect, and I want to push for budget increases
both for the NSF physical sciences and DOE Office of Science. The deleterious
effect of delays and sometimes rejection of visas for graduate students,
post docs, and senior scientists is a crisis that must be solved before
international scientific collaboration has sustained permanent damage.
The UEC is working very hard with user groups from other laboratories to
make progress in this area. The UEC also serves to improve the quality of
life for users at Fermilab, so that they can be happy, productive physicists.
It is a conduit of outreach both for the public and for the government.
The UEC supports the Fermilab users in developing future directions for the
lab and for the HEP community. The UEC, together with the GSA, helps to
find ways to increase the visibility and further the careers of young
physicists in a time when increasing collaboration size is changing the
sociology of experiments. The UEC works very hard for the Fermilab Users
community and I am proud to be a part of this effort."
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| last modified 9/23/2003 email Fermilab |
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