Candidate Statement
Historical circumstances have left nuclear and elementary-particle properties of matter somewhat separate from the rest of laboratory astrophysics. Nuclear aspects of astrophysics are funded mainly by the nuclear sections of the funding agencies, not the astronomical sections. Laboratory determination of nuclear properties for astrophysics is in fact viewed as a core area of low-energy nuclear physics by the funding agencies and the nuclear community at large. This happy circumstance has resulted in unhappily weak integration of nuclear astrophysics practitioners into the laboratory astrophysics community. Most American researchers in nuclear astrophysics see the American Physical Society and its Division of Nuclear Physics, not the AAS, as their professional home. Better incorporation of nuclear physicists into LAD would serve much more important purposes than semantic consistency in the phrase "laboratory astrophysics:" nuclear astrophysics shares with other areas of laboratory astrophysics experimental methods (like ion sources and mass spectrometry), problems of data evaluation, and quantum many-body collision and radiation problems. Moreover, the goals of nuclear astrophysics face risks from gaps in knowledge of atomic data used to interpret spectra.
I have been less directly involved in particle astrophysics, but I have worked in particle cosmology, and I spent earlier career phases adjacent to significant particle astrophysics efforts. There the issues seem rather different, with shakier funding agency support and data needs more directly tied to the generation and detection of signals. In any case, this field faces similar scientific and bureaucratic challenges as other areas of laboratory astrophysics and (like nuclear astrophysics) has had limited direct contact with "traditional" astronomy and its laboratory enterprise.
All areas of astrophysics would benefit from stronger integration of the nuclear and particle sections of the community into the larger laboratory astrophysics community, and a good place to begin is with participation in LAD and its activities. I would like to promote affiliate membership in LAD by particle and nuclear astrophysicists, and encourage them to see AAS as a link to a broader astronomical community than they come into contact with through their APS divisions. I would seek opportunities for LAD to work together with the APS Division of Nuclear Physics, the APS Division of Astrophysics, and the APS Topical Group on Few-Body Physics (where I have a year remaining as an Executive Committee member). I would seek to organize sessions of the LAD Annual Meeting that have sufficiently broad focus to invite both nuclear/particle and more traditional laboratory astrophysics speakers, with the explicit goal of facilitating personal contacts and encouraging the invited speakers and t heir students (or advisers!) to join LAD. By my count, six of the 170 LAD members are currently nuclear physicists, and there are actually no names that I immediately associate with particle astrophysics (possibly a measure of my own ignorance), so there is a large need for growth.
