40 years, one vision
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40 years, one vision www.mrs.org/timeline by Gail A. Oare
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n May 23, 1973, 300 scientists convened at The Pennsylvania State University to discuss phase transitions. The topic was crosscutting and the program deliberately designed to ensure representation of various research disciplines. The Meeting spanned basic to applied research, and included scientists from academia, industry, and government. In the early 1970s, researchers whose work crossed boundaries between conventional disciplines were largely ignored by the traditional professional societies. By the end of this three-day meeting, 215 of the attendees signed up as the first members of the new Materials Research Society, an organization that would pay a lot of attention to its members over the next 40 years. Today, MRS plays host annually at its meetings to 11,000 scientists from around the world, participating across more than 100 topical symposia at its Spring and Fall Meetings. Along with them, an additional 6000 members are able to access the meeting content online. Every year, hundreds of researchers volunteer their talents and time to MRS to develop subsequent meetings and workshops, serve on editorial boards, and formulate initiatives to advance science education, career services, and public policy. MRS’s success is a story of the people who opened the doors to interdisciplinary inquiry and those who subsequently charted a path that led to remarkable research advances, professional partnerships, and public appreciation for the role of materials in our lives. These individuals—with their openness to and respect for new ideas and directions, entrepreneurial spirit, and commitment to excellence—created a very special and enduring MRS culture. Following is a small glimpse of what they made happen and what it holds for the future.
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MRS BULLETIN
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VOLUME 38 • NOVEMBER 2013
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Opening up the dialogue Meetings were essentially the only function of MRS in its early years and were not pure-research oriented. They “focused on the themes that were the object of the day-to-day multidisciplinary research in the major laboratories,” said 1979 MRS president R.J.H. Voorhoeve. “MRS became the home for people who identified as strongly, or more strongly, with their field of [research and development] than with their original university discipline.” Furthermore, in order to make room for leading-edge research areas, no topic was to be hard-wired into the meetings, and everyone—active researcher and nonspecialist alike—was welcome to participate in the topical symposia. Within five years of the initial meeting at Penn State, Voorhoeve recalled, scientists were grabbing the opportunity to organize symposia in their fields and meeting attendance hit 1000.
www.mrs.org/bulletin
Meeting logistics were carefully designed to further encourage interaction. Symposium organizers planned joint sessions on areas of overlap. Daytime discussions spilled over into the hallways. Discussions during the evening poster sessions, bolstered with snacks and beer, ran well into t
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