How science will shape our shared future
APS members, volunteers, and staff reflect on Global Physics Summit theme
As more than 14,000 scientists met in person in Denver, Colorado, and through satellite sites around the world for the 2026 Global Physics Summit, they were greeted by the meeting’s theme, “Science for a shared future.”
Far from an abstraction, those five simple words represent something real. They speak to a future shaped not only by discovery, but also by who gets to participate in science, and how their voices mold our very way of life.
For Samuel Crowe, a first-year master's student at the University of Oxford, a shared future means alignment on vision. “In order to sculpt a shared societal vision for the future — one that involves science as one of its catalysts — all facets of society, including lawmakers, leaders of industry, and the general public, must be involved,” explains Crowe, a 2025 recipient of the APS LeRoy Apker Award. “As the experts on and conductors of science, scientists must play a key role in opening discussions about the importance and broader societal relevance of their work."
Crowe is not alone in his thinking. “We envision a shared future in which more people do science, in which the community welcomes talent from every background, and in which the scientific community works together to serve society,” says Jonathan Bagger, APS CEO, speaking about this year’s theme.
From anxiety to action
Throughout 2025, the APS community worked together to push back against political pressures that posed serious risk to the physics enterprise. The most direct threat came through proposed cuts to the budgets of U.S. federal science agencies, including a reduction of more than 50% of the NSF budget and more than 47% of the NASA Science Directorate’s.
In a scientific ecosystem built on international collaboration, the consequences would not have stopped at U.S. borders. Cuts at that scale had the potential to disrupt the careers of thousands of physicists, slow research, and weaken parts of the global scientific enterprise that depend on long-term investment, cross-border collaboration, and shared infrastructure.
In response to those proposed cuts, the scientific community spoke up, and loudly.
“Thousands of our members across the country contacted their legislators, with some even visiting them in person,” says APS Chief External Affairs Officer Francis Slakey. “Many also wrote op-eds and letters to the editor of their local newspapers.”
“APS advocacy efforts organized and empowered our members to speak,” he adds, “and I couldn’t be prouder of the result.”
The result in question? Thanks in part to the efforts of APS members, Congress acted in a bipartisan manner to restore approximately $10 billion from the proposed cuts to four key federal science agencies, including NSF and NASA Science.
“We need to consistently remind ourselves that behind every federal dollar we're fighting for, there is an undergraduate on an REU, there's a graduate student on a stipend, there's a professor on a research grant, there are employees at our federal science agencies,” Slakey says.
The consequences of underfunding are both local and global. When research slows, when talent pipelines narrow, or when scientific institutions lose capacity, the effects ripple outward — across collaborations, across borders, and across the broader systems of education, innovation, and discovery that connect the physics community worldwide.
One global community
It is that interconnectedness that gives the phrase “shared future” much of its meaning.
“The power and the strength of the community is in our people, and APS brings them together,” notes APS Director of Membership Cortney Bougher. “When we're on Capitol Hill or talking to physics leaders around the world, we're speaking with the strength of 50,000 physicists,” she adds. “That really means something.”
In early 2025, Bougher and her team pledged to provide as much stability as possible for the physics community during a time of transition and disruption, even waiving membership fees for scientists facing financial hardship.
One of the most important resources is the ability to collaborate with scientists worldwide. “A quarter of APS members are international,” comments 2026 APS President Brad Marston. “That international character is not incidental to physics; it is essential to it. Our field depends on collaboration that no single country, institution, or laboratory can sustain on its own.”
For Phong Dang, a Ph.D. student in nuclear physics at Louisiana State University and the international affairs officer of the APS Forum on Graduate Student Affairs, the stakes are personal. "Science has no passport,” Dang says, “yet as a foreign graduate student, I know firsthand that scientists very much do. Physics brought me from Vietnam to Europe and then to the U.S., and it is the reason I believe so deeply in this year's theme."
In 2025, APS launched a significant and sustained effort to support international students and scholars in the U.S. and the departments that employ them. At the Summit, Dang served on a Global Physics Panel that discussed ways the scientific community can respond to potential changes in international student visas that may curtail study in the U.S.
Maria Longobardi, an APS Councilor and chair of the APS Forum on Industrial and Applied Physics, also presented at the Summit, on a data-driven approach to international collaboration in physics. Longobardi, originally from Italy and based at the University of Basel in Switzerland, credits APS as the driving force in her ability to stay connected.
“As an international APS member, I see APS as my home community," says Longobardi. “Over the years, I have felt welcomed, included, and encouraged. That sense of support and belonging is exactly what helps make a shared scientific future possible."
APS has also continued to expand access to global participation through the Global Physics Summit satellite site events, which include 23 sites based in 18 nations for the 2026 meeting. “The satellite sites program has completely transformed the ability of physicists to participate in the Global Physics Summit,” remarks Slakey.
He notes that the 2019 APS March Meeting hosted just 13 physicists from the entirety of the African continent, but that in 2026, the satellite sites program facilitated remote participation by physicists from ten different African nations
APS is making additional moves to expand publishing access worldwide, recently announcing the launch of two new open access journals: PRX Intelligence, which will publish work on artificial intelligence and machine learning; and APS Open Science, designed to expand global participation in research publishing.
Strength through diversity
Crystal Bailey, APS director of careers, education, and inclusive communities, says that working to make physics accessible to more people is not only a nice-to-have, but existential.
“To keep this discipline relevant and healthy and thriving, we need to attract younger people into it,” she states. “But at the same time, it's not enough to just sort of bring people in the door; we have to actually create an environment where they have everything they need to thrive.”
Bailey points to APS’ numerous programs designed to expand access for students and early-career scientists and to support meaningful cultural and systems change across the physics community.
“This is about including more people, not excluding anyone,” says Bailey. “Our efforts are about making meaningful cultural change and systems change within physics so that more people are welcome to participate, more people get the resources they need to be successful, more people come in the door as physicists, and more people stay in the room with us as physicists.”
Marston agrees. “Diversity is crucial to scientific progress,” he comments. “It broadens the questions we ask, the methods we use, and the problems we choose to solve, and APS is not backing down from that fact.”
A thriving physics enterprise depends on curiosity, rigor, integrity, and access, and on a community that makes room for talent from every background and every part of the world.
Building the future
“Planning the future of physics is an exercise in reverse engineering,” concludes Bougher. “If we have a vision of what the future is going to look like, what are the steps that we need to be taking together today to lead us there?”
Slakey’s focus is on the natural expansion of advocacy efforts.
“In 2025, we effectively mobilized our physics community,” he says. “The next stage will be finding ways to encourage targeted segments of the general, non-scientist public to join us in making the case for science.”
These visions of the future are tall orders, but they reflect a belief shared across our community: the future of physics will be stronger if it is more connected, more inclusive, and global.
“We know what our ideal future of physics looks like,” says Bailey, “and physicists have proven they won’t walk away from the work.”