Sixth East Coast Gravity Meeting

David Fiske, University of Maryland drfiske@physics.umd.edu

The Sixth East Coast Gravity Meeting was held at the University of Maryland, College Park on March 29 and March 30, 2003. Thirty-five contributed talks on a wide range of gravity-related topics filled a one and one-half day program, attended by over fifty people from as far north as Maine, as far south as North Carolina, and as far west as California. The meeting was divided into two sessions dedicated to numerical relativity, one session covering classical general relativity and gravitational waves, one session dealing with compact objects, and three sessions touching on topics from the broad category of general relativity and beyond.

As has been the tradition at the East Coast Meetings, a large number of students contributed talks to this year's meeting. In addition to the ten graduate students (from Brown, Maryland, Penn State, and Syracuse) who presented, two undergraduates from Bowdoin College contributed excellent talks. David Mattingly from the University of Maryland was recognized with the Best Student Presentation Award, sponsored by the APS Topical Group on Gravitation. The judges also recognized Monica Skoge, an undergraduate from Bowdoin College, with an Honorable Mention in this year's competition.

Although there are no formal proceedings for the meeting, the program with abstracts remains online at the conference webpage www.physics.umd.edu/grt/ecgm. We have encouraged speakers to provide relevant references to archived papers, and have added active links to those papers so that interested readers can easily follow up on the content of the talks. Speakers still wishing to add such references should send them to ecgm@physics.umd.edu.

The Seventh East Coast Gravity Meeting will be held next year at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. A link to the conference webpage, when it is available, will appear on the East Coast Gravity Meeting coordinating committee's webpage http://physics.syr.edu/~marolf/ECGM.html. In addition, the coordinating committee is accepting volunteers to host future meetings. Information about the history of the meeting and about volunteering are also available on the committee's webpage.

This year's organizers would like to thank the University of Maryland Department of Physics for contributing financial support.