Venue - smb6-conference

Venue and Facilities

The various conference activities will be held in the colloquium room of the University of Michigan (UM) Physics Department. This room has auditorium style seating and a mixture of seats with and without a desktop. Contiguous space is available for poster sessions and coffee breaks. Free internet will be available to all conference participants.

The UM Physics Department is located in the West Hall of the UM central campus in the heart of Ann Arbor, MI. Ann Arbor is a relatively diverse city of about 114,000 residents, not counting UM students. It is a forested river city built on moderately hilly land that slopes down to the Huron River. Rental boating and other recreational activities on the river are popular and there is a large UM Arboretum along the banks of the river, within walking distance of the UM central campus. The UM central campus is spacious, peaceful, treed and park like. It is contiguous to the downtown of Ann Arbor. Many of the downtown streets are also treed. There are hotels located within a 1 to 2 block walk of the West Hall. Thus attendees will find themselves housed within easy walking distance both of the meeting itself and the downtown, which offers safe and pleasant evening strolling to many local businesses and restaurants of all price levels and cuisines, catering to UM students and Ann Arbor residents. Most restaurants feature outdoor sidewalk seating in good weather.

The UM central campus has three high quality museums open to the public. The conference banquet will be held in the Museum of Art, which in 2009 opened a landmark $41.9 million expansion and major restoration of its Beaux-Arts historic home, Alumni Memorial Hall. The Exhibit Museum of Natural History features, among many things, a unique-in-the-world collection of prehistoric whale fossils that document the unusual evolution of a land animal to an ocean-going animal. This collection was made by renowned UM paleontologist Philip D. Gingerich. Sixty-five percent of the collection of the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology derives from important UM excavations in the Mediterranean conducted during the 1920s and 1930s. It also includes Egyptian scarabs and seals collected by former UM Physics faculty member Samuel A. Goudsmit. The UM Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library has a Special Collections branch that houses an internationally acclaimed collection of rare books and manuscripts, including the originals of a draft of a letter from Galileo to Leonardo Donato, Doge of Venice, in August, 1609, and Notes on the Moons of Jupiter, January 1610.

In the downtown there is also the Ann Arbor Hands-On Science Museum, delightful for science lovers of all ages. Ann Arbor’s Motawi Tileworks welcomes visitors to learn about the making of its many tiles ranging from artistic to practical.

Ann Arbor is located approximately 30 minutes from the Detroit International Airport (DTW), which has non-stop international flights to Europe and Asia and good non-stop national service. DTW is roughly half way between Ann Arbor and Detroit.

Detroit is a very interesting city with a magnificent history and a troubled modern period from which it is trying to recover, there being recent encouraging activity in both the private and the public sectors. Reminders of both periods include the world class Detroit Institute of the Arts, the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, the Motown Historical Museum and the Henry Ford Museum.