Executive and Selection Committee Guidelines

Unit Executive Committee responsibilities

Each Unit Executive Committee is responsible for canvassing for nominations, promoting the honor, and forming the selection committee.

Canvassing and promotion

APS staff will support the general promotion of nomination opportunities for APS Fellows, Prizes, and Awards. Unit Executive Committees and/or Canvassing Committees are also encouraged to promote nomination opportunities through their unit communication channels. Selection Committee members are prohibited from directly soliciting or coordinating specific nominations for the honors they are selecting, but they may encourage or broadly promote nominations, including for the honors they will be involved in selecting.

If executive committee officers wish to submit a nomination themselves, they should refer to the conflict of interest definition and examples to ensure there are no conflicts, or contact honors@aps.org for clarification.

Forming Selection Committees

Selection Committees recommend recipients to the appropriate entity for approval, provided that qualified nominees are available. Honors Selection Committees are appointed by the unit, committee, or other body overseeing the honor. Appointments are subject to verification of compliance with Honors Policies and Procedures by APS staff, with oversight from the Committee on Honors.

Selection Committees should consist of a chair, vice chair, and additional members. The vice chair serves for one year before transitioning into the chair role, serving an additional year as chair. Units without a selection-committee process that includes this chair-vice chair structure should adopt and follow a process that ensures continuity, information transfer, and institutional memory from year to year.

Guidelines for promoting equity

The APS Committees on the Status of Women in Physics and on Minorities have crafted guidelines to improve the effectiveness of award, prize and fellowship committees in finding the most qualified person from a diverse, representative pool of candidates.

Selection Committee responsibilities

Selection committees are charged with reviewing nominations and recommending recipients for prizes, awards, and Fellowships, ensuring adherence to APS Honors Policies and Ethics Guidelines.

The Chair’s role

The overseeing unit, committee, or other body determines the role of the chair, whether as convener or voting member. When the chair serves solely as a convener, they may act as a substitute reviewer for nominations that lack a sufficient number of reviewers. The chair’s primary responsibility is to facilitate the review and selection process, ensuring timely completion and strict adherence to Honors policies and procedures. While overseeing and documenting the process, the chair typically does not score or vote on nominees, except to meet the minimum reviewer requirement or resolve a tie. The chair may participate in discussions but should focus on their role as facilitator.

Key responsibilities for committee chairs include:

• Reviewing all nominations.
• Documenting and overseeing the review process.
• Hosting at least one meeting, either by phone or Zoom, based on committee availability.
• Reporting the selected winner to APS using the APS Chair Report Form.
• Abstaining from involvement in the review of any nomination for the honor.
• Adhering to APS Honors Policies, Procedures, and Ethics Guidelines.

Support for the Selection Committee Chair from APS Honors staff

To support you in this process, APS staff is happy to assist by:

• Scheduling committee calls
• Providing score sheets for committee members
• Addressing conflicts of interest between selection committee members and nominees
• Clarifying rules, eligibility, and review procedures
• Sharing APS Zoom links for committee meetings
• Attending initial committee meetings to answer procedural questions
• Conducting training sessions on accessing the APS Honors Nominations system

Reporting

The chair of the selection committee is responsible for completing the Chair Report, an online form used by APS Honors staff to collect the necessary information for final approval by the Committee on Honors and the APS Council Steering Committee. Please note that some unit bylaws may require the report to be reviewed by the unit executive committee before submission to APS Honors.

The form requests the following information:

• Recipient names, affiliations, and suggested citations
• Review criteria and selection process
• Reasoning for recipient selection
• Conflict of interest disclosures
• (Optional) Feedback

Next steps in the approval process:

• The APS Committee on Honors and the APS Council Steering Committee will review and approve recipients.
• Official notifications will be sent to recipients by APS Honors.

Confidentiality is essential during this period, and we kindly request that you maintain strict confidentiality regarding nominees and provisional recipients.

Scoring and review procedure

APS Honors staff recommend that the selection committee Chair convene committee members to establish a review strategy aligned with the purpose of the recognition. In some cases, the overseeing Unit Executive Committee may provide a documented review process or past guidance. Unless a specific strategy is mandated by unit bylaws or standard operating procedures, the selection committee has the flexibility to adopt an approach that best suits the honor, committee availability, and number of nominations.

APS offers an optional scoring procedure designed to guide discussions rather than replace or automate them. This method is successfully used by the APS Medal and Prize Committee and the Apker Award Selection Committee but is not required if the unit already has an effective system in place.

The suggested procedure involves committee members reviewing and rating each nomination through the APS Honors Nominations system on a scale from one (least recommended) to five (most recommended), generating a shortlist of top candidates.

Instructions for Scoring in the APS Honors Nominations System

• Log in to the APS nomination system using your myAPS account credentials.
• Select "My Reviewing Assignments."
• Review and rate each nomination on a scale from one (least recommended) to five (most recommended).
• After the scoring deadline, the Chair will review the committee’s scores and facilitate a discussion of the candidates.

The Chair may also assign each committee member as a primary reviewer for a subset of nominations. Primary reviewers should be prepared to briefly summarize their assigned nominations during the selection call before discussion. Assignments may be loosely based on the nominee’s area of physics but are not required to follow a strict categorization.

If a clear consensus is not reached during the selection call, additional methods such as voice voting or ranking candidates in real-time may help the committee finalize its decision.

Selection Committee conflicts of interest

Conflicts of interest arise between reviewer and nominee in situations where there are close personal or professional relationships, lines of authority, or fiscal responsibility. Some examples include:

• Residing at the same institution, division, or department within the past four years
• Collaborations (co-authors, post-docs, etc.) published within the past four years
• Financial via direct chain of command and/or participation in tenure, promotion, salary or forms of support by either party
• Member of the same center or sharing any funding contract
• Relationship due to immediate blood relation, current or prior marriage or civil union
• Current or prior students, advisees, and advisors
• Nominator or participant in the nomination package

Selection Committee members are responsible for disclosing all potential conflicts of interest prior to review and assessment of nominations. The primary conflicts of concern are those between Selection Committee members and nominees and their institutions. Conflicts between selection committee members and nominators or supporters and their institutions are secondary but should be disclosed so all committee members are aware, and they can be managed by the selection committee. Selection committees are responsible for monitoring, handling, and reporting resolution for conflicts of interest.

Immediately after nominations are available for review, committee members should review the list of nominees and their institutions/departments and disclose to the entire committee any conflicts of interest as described above or other potential conflicts as the list of examples is not exhaustive. The committee should unanimously agree on a response based on the level of the conflict. Recusal from scoring and discussion of the person with whom a committee member has a conflict is likely appropriate for most cases. In more serious cases, a new committee member may need to be identified. In some cases, disclosure to the committee may be considered sufficient. The chair is responsible for documenting the details of each conflict and the committee’s unanimous response in the chair report. If the committee cannot agree unanimously, the conflicted committee member(s) should be recused from scoring and discussing the affected nomination(s).

Given the large size of many institutions where physicists work, and the number and variety of their departments/divisions, shared institutional affiliation is less of a concern in these cases than shared department/division affiliation. Similarly, co-authorship of a multi-hundred-author paper from a major collaboration should be addressed pragmatically, based on the closeness of collaboration between the specific committee member and specific nominee.

Confidentiality and information security

Individuals serving on a selection committee must not disclose information about the committee’s business to individuals outside of the selection process. Selection Committee business includes:

• The committee’s deliberations
• The number of nominations reviewed
• Conflicts of interest
• Other sensitive information

The recommended recipients are not official until approved by the APS Council of Representatives and the recipient has been notified.

If you have any questions about the review process, please contact the APS Honors program manager.