Background 

The Australian Institute of Physics Congress 2024 (AIP 2024) brought together physicists and technologists across research, education, government, and industry, fostering collaboration and celebrating breakthroughs across the physical sciences and technology. The congress was co-located with three other conferences – the 17th International Conference on Near-field Optics and Nanophotonics (NFO-17), the Australian and New Zealand Conference on Optics and Photonics (ANZCOP) and the Conference on Optoelectronic and Microelectronic Materials and Devices (COMMAD) – with the AIP Congress being the largest among them.  

Challenges 

One of the primary goals was to increase student participation to entice up-and-coming career professionals. Historically, the event attracted around 10 students, but this year’s goal was to surpass that figure considerably. The team had to find ways to encourage students to register and attend while keeping costs manageable. 

A decision from the Organising Committee was to accept all abstracts that were submitted – which made for a compelling, if not lengthy, program. This required precision program management across 10 concurrent streams, along with a reliable solution to manage speakers and speaker presentations onsite.  

Solutions 

• Student Engagement: The team successfully increased student participation by promoting the congress through targeted digital marketing efforts. They also made the event more accessible to students by lowering cost barriers to participation and introducing a student-focused program. 

• Program Organisation: Organisers utilised an innovative platform from evexus that allowed speakers to upload their presentations in advance. This helped alleviate stress for the speakers, who could be confident their presentation was ready to go ahead of time, and avoided program delays. The program was carefully planned to fit in all content within the Congress window, meaning each day ran to 6.30pm. 

Outcomes 

The congress ran smoothly despite the challenges of managing such a large program. In total 911 abstracts were presented with no delays or technical issues. 

The student procurement strategy attracted 70 students to AIP 2024, significantly increasing student participation compared to previous years, which had an average of 10 students. This demonstrated the congress’s growing appeal to the next generation of physicists and contributed to its long-term goals of fostering interest in physics. 

The event not only fulfilled its educational goals but also expanded the reach of physics to the broader public via a public lecture. In total, AIP 2024 exceeded more than 1,100 attendees, making it the largest gathering for the host body.