Welcome to OAS 2021

Have you grown weary of teleworking and evenings with Netflix? Now’s your chance to put on some real clothes and join us for the 2021 OAS Annual Meeting at the brand-new Element Hotel in Center City Philadelphia. While in Philly, explore nearby City Hall and enjoy lunch at the Reading Terminal Market. Increase your exposure to culture as you will be within minutes of art museums such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Rodin Museum, or the Barnes Foundation. Immerse yourself in American history at Independence National Historical Park, home to the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall along with many other historical museums. Stop and smell the formaldehyde with a visit to The Mütter Museum. When all this activity makes you tired and hungry, sit down and dig into some of the incredible culinary options the city has to offer, most within several blocks of our meeting venue.

Yo! Come to Philly; the City of Brotherly Love. Home to The Liberty Bell, Rocky, cheesesteaks, soft pretzels, and the Mummers.

Oh… and reunite with your colleagues of the National Materials Program!

See you in August!

Terry Derstine, PA

When you get tired of the crowds, the heat, the smells (PU from combined sewers) of Philadelphia, don’t forget just a short distance away are the World-Class beaches of New Jersey. There is so much to see from historic Whitesbog Village in the Pine Barrens where Elizabeth White produced the first cultivated blueberry for sale in 1916, to 72 miles of hiking on the Appalachian Trail in the northwest part of the state.

Follow the Women’s History Trail. Check out The Crossroads of the Revolution: See the barracks where Revolutionary War soldiers stayed in Trenton, see where a cannon ball dented Nassau Hall in Princeton (where the Continental Congress met on the campus of Princeton University), and see where George Washington crossed the Delaware. And speaking of the Delaware River, this is the longest free flowing river east of the Mississippi!

OK, Ben Franklin is cool, but we have a mini-Einstein museum in Princeton in the back of Landau’s (where they sell Icelandic wool coats and really cool Pi T-shirts) AND we have Thomas Edison’s laboratory in West Orange. If you go to that neck of the woods, you could also visit the graves of some of the Radium Girls. You also might be able to snag a tour at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. But whatever you do, make sure to have pizza in what was just named the best state in the whole country for Pizza by Food & Wine magazine!

So come to the OAS meeting, but take an extra couple days to explore what the Garden State has to offer. You will be amazed, and by the time you leave, you will know how to pronounce it. Just an FYI, it’s not Joisey, it’s Jersey. And yes, you can leave off the New.

And if you want to, I mean New York City is nearby. I hear they have some stuff to see too.

Jenny Goodman, NJ