By Ian Bearden, Chair of DFS

The Danish Physical Society had its annual General Assembly in the Margrethe Bohr Sal at the Niels Bohr Building at the University of Copenhagen on October 4.  The General Assembly was preceded by two scientific talks, “Ice Sheet Tipping Points and Sea Level Rise” by Christine Hvidberg, Niels Bohr Institute, and “Gravitational and Spectroscopic studies of antimatter: the ALPHA antihydrogen experiment at CERN” by Jeff Hangst, Aarhus University.  These excellent talks showcase both the quality and breadth of Danish physics. 

The General Assembly included the report from the Chair, where the current status and the plans for the coming year were presented.  The highlights here are that we have modernized our membership and accounting procedures to be compliant with new transparency and privacy rules.  The result of the modernization is that we have a much better understanding of who our members are, and our members are now able to pay their membership fees online.  DFS currently has 381 members.  In the coming year, we will hold elections for the DFS Board in October 2025 and hope to see many new candidates standing for election.  To make nomination and election procedures more modern and less complicated, the current Board presented new election rules to the membership.  The new election rules were unanimously approved by the General Assembly. 

The goals presented by the boards for 2025 are:

1. Increase our membership by 10%.
2. Better involve our members in the activities of DFS.
3. Encourage more active sections.
4. Encourage the establishment of new sections to reflect our members’ changing needs and interests.

The treasurer presented the financial report for the past year and the budget for the coming year.  The financial report and the budget were approved, and we thank the treasurer for her work in making sure our finances are in order.

Following the treasurer’s report, we presented the membership fees for 2025.  The new accounting and membership rules mentioned above increase our administrative costs so we have had to raise the fees.  The fees for 2025 will be 450 DKK for regular members, 200 DKK for students (including PhD students) and 300 DKK for retired members.  This allows the DFS to “break-even” for retirees. The current DFS board feels that our student members are essential for the future of the Society and for and for this reason we subsidize their memberships. 

The Board expressed its wish to update the DFS logo to last us through the next 50 years. Therefore, we have announced a contest for the new logo design.  We will accept entries until December 1^st and the winning design will receive a prize of 1000 DKK.

The final official order of business was to ask the assembled members for suggestions. The discussion under this point centered on student members.  A suggestion was made that we accept members from upper secondary schools.  The board finds this suggestion excellent, and we will work to identify people to implement this idea.  Finally, there was a discussion about how we can better include students, in particular bachelor students.  We think that this is also extremely important and hope to identify a few students to revitalize the Student Section (FSID) in 2025. 

We hope to see you all at the DFS 2025 Annual Meeting, which will be held at DTU May 14-15.

After the meeting’s conclusion, there was an informal gathering and discussion over drinks and snacks. We were happy to be joined by Robbert Dijkgraaf, the former Minister of Science and Education in the Netherlands. 

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