Creating Collaborative Space for Filipino Physics Students and International Scientists' Encounters— The Case of Physics Meetup in the Philippines

As primarily taught in schools, science tends to focus mainly on technical concepts and equations while overlooking the scientist as a person with sociocultural histories and relationships that impacted scientific discovery. Consequently, most students, especially from the rural areas in the Philippines, are unaware of how to access and be part of these academic family trees and relationships. The pandemic came with an incredible resource— the shift to online tools leveraged communication and collaboration and opened the opportunity to overcome existing physical and geographical barriers. From a small initiative for our physics students in Bukidnon, Physics Meetup has grown to bring together the public from all over the Philippines to learn from and interact directly with prominent physicists, including the Nobel Laureate in Physics Donna Strickland and Breakthrough Prize Laureate Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell. With volunteers from different schools facilitating our free sessions, we reached nearly 5000 audiences on Zoom and more than 50k on Facebook. This is a feat in the Philippines, where physics learning is not generally emphasized, especially in rural schools. With the ICTP Physics Without Frontiers' support, we also provided mobile data assistance to more than 1000 students to access the internet. As our volunteers and participants become more motivated to pursue physics degrees and careers, we aim to showcase how life-changing collaborative, and inclusive community that promotes physics can be.