Where Do We Go From Here?
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Where Do We Go From Here? Gordon E. Pike, MRS President In another article in this issue of the BULLETIN, outgoing MRS President Elton Kaufmann has described the ferment of activities of the Materials Research Society in 1985. It should be clear from this that the Society continues not only to expand, but also to encompass new activities which are beneficial to its members and to the materials research community at large. Society efforts this coming year will maintain this trend, but not as a blind goal. Growth for its own sake is not desirable for MRS since it may misdirect o u r valuable h u m a n resources away from the central purposes of the Society. MRS was established to foster interaction between scientists of many disciplines working on common materials problems, to hold interdisciplinary meetings for such people, and to disseminate related information. The focus of the 1986 officers and committees will be directed toward actively implementing these goals while concurrently stabilizing the organizational structure which makes successful implementation possible. Probably the most visible committee of MRS, at least in terms of its projects, is the Program C o m m i t t e e . This committee, chaired by Rod Quinn in 1986, is charged with identifying the new, emerging materials research areas which we should be covering in our Spring and Fall technical meetings. The responsibility for this lies principally with the future meeting chairs who are all members of this committee. Topic selection for a given meeting proceeds more or less independently, but with cooperative recognition of th* plans for other meetings. For that reason each triad of meeting chairs has been selected with deliberate attention to balance their disciplinary background, materials interest, and institutional setting. An examination of past and future symposium topics shows that this strategy has been successful for realizing one of the main MRS purposes. However, the job of the meeting chairs does not end there. They are also responsible for orchestrating their entire meeting. While this gives them substantial creative freedom, it also imposes obligations of a nontechnical nature. A continuing major goal for this year is to increase the nontechnical s u p p o r t to the meeting and symposium chairs through MRS Headquarters. The dissemination of information useful to scientists performing interdisciplinary materials research is a duty assigned primarily to the Publications Committee. There are currently three robust projects within this committee to provide this dissemination under the overall chair-
1986 President Pike outlines goals and identifies MRS leaders who will pursue them.
manship of David Campbell. The MRS BULLETIN is the Society's organ to provide information of general interest to the materials research community. For the past several years the BULLETIN has been rapidly evolving from the status of a member newsletter toward that of a recognized resource for a broad spectrum of materials scientists. The new chairman of the BULLET
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