Letter from the President
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What's Up? Part Deux What's up? A little less than a year ago I posed this question as the title for my first letter in MRS Bulletin, and used it as an excuse to talk about the challenges and opportunities I saw for the Materials Research Society, and to lay out the sorts of issues I expected to work on with you over the year. This time, I'm going to use this question to say a few words about what is actually going on, and specifically what the Society officers and councilors have been up to over the past year. One of the Society's activities that has received special attention over the past year is its most important one, its meetings. At the Fall 1995 Council meeting (the last of three annual nonvirtual council meetings) there was a report on the Society's program development process, including some detailed comparisons with the program development processes of other societies serving the materials research and engineering community. This benchmarking process highlighted some striking differences from other organizations. Most notably, MRS is almost unique among societies of comparable size in not having standing topical divisions or groups whose membership evolves slowly and which play key roles in defining and negotiating program content. MRS has a single program committee with continuously changing membership which advises the set of three or four new chairs selected for each meeting. These chairs have the responsibility for the development of the Society's extraordinarily broad program. They are also given a great deal of latitude and encouragement in defining new symposium topics, and redefining or retiring old ones. After considerable discussion, the clear consensus of the council was that our very different process for program development was a good one, and that while some fine tuning was called for, the system wasn't broken and didn't need fixing. In fact, it was generally felt that our relatively open system was the key to the continued development of exciting programs that keep us all informed at the forefront of materials research. Given this, one of the main actions inspired by this discussion was to redefine and broaden the role of an expanded Program Development Subcommittee of the Program Committee. This subcommittee is now charged with assisting the chairs in identifying new topics of emerging interest and in finding appropriate symposium organizers. This
MRS BULLETIN/DECEMBER 1996
r subcommittee has also been asked to engage in long-range planning for topical coverage, focusing especially on emerging subdisciplines, working in concert with the parent committee and also the meeting quality subcommittee. The Long-Range Planning Committee also examined issues associated with meetings, quickly focusing on two main concerns: the declining industrial participation in our meetings and whether our meeting locations provide the appropriate venue for meetings of the quality to which we aspire. A number of recommendations resulted from the discussions of industrial participation, but perhaps the most sig
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