In line with its mission to share expertise, resources and training in physics education with other institutions throughout the country, LUMS physics lab (PhysLab) recently hosted five budding scientists as they worked on ten interesting problems in preparation for the International Young Physicists’ Tournament 2016 to be hosted in Yekaterinburg, Russia.
The event dubbed as the ‘Physics World Cup’ is a team-oriented scientific competition among secondary school students, where participants present their solutions to scientific problems they have prepared over several months and then discuss their solutions with other teams.
Inclusion of Physlab’s team is a significant achievement as it is the first time a team of brilliant students from Pakistan is representing the nation on such International platform. This project is part of The Physlab’s two to three months internships where students from all across the country can get mentorship and benefit from research facilities and design tools housed in LUMS’ well-equipped workshops.
The students were mentored by LUMS Physics faculty, Dr. Sabieh Anwar, lab instructors Umar Hasan and Azeem Iqbal while original equipment was especially built by Hafiz Rizwan for the students. This was during an intensive three month long period where these students were guided towards finding innovative and rigorous solutions to mind-baffling physical phenomena such as electric honeycombs, hot water geysers, rollers on rollers, magnetic trains, ultra-hydrophobic water, acoustic metamaterials and mechanical machines to generate random numbers.
The project is led by Dr. Farida Tahir of COMSATS’s Physics Department in Islamabad. The team includes:
- Khadija Niazi (LCAS)
- Muhammad Shaheer Niazi (LCAS)
- Shaheer Akhtar (LGS)
- Muhammad Ahad Butt (Karachi Grammar School)
- Aliza Shahid (LGS)
Treating science and physics as a common heritage, Physlab is definitely first of its kind in the country, which is breaking the barriers in knowledge sharing and has so far helped cultivate five physics laboratories in Pakistan outside LUMS.
Originally set up by Associate Professor of Physics, Dr. Sabieh Anwar along with a team of research and support staff, The Physics lab (PhysLab as it is called) first opened its doors to its first batch of 150 students in Fall 2008. Currently, about 1200 students have completed their introductory physics course. Comprising experiments from basic kinematics to the more state-of-the art experiments on superconducting quantum interference devices.
