The View from the Gude Mansion…Committees Galore!

Crispin Taylor

Phew…What a week!

Most ASPB committees—the volunteer groups that govern the Society—meet twice a year—once in the summer during the Society’s annual meeting and once in the winter at the ASPB headquarters in Rockville, Maryland. This year, by a quirk of scheduling, several committees held their winter meetings back to back from Friday, February 25, through Wednesday, March 2. Although it was a grueling few days—particularly for committee chairs and presidents—some exciting things happened.

The omnibus weekend got off to a great start with ASPB’s Minority Affairs Committee (MAC). After a recent change in leadership—Anthony DePass took over in the fall from Regina McClinton, who was obliged to step down for personal reasons after two years of superb work for the committee—there was a great deal of energy and ideas around the table. Coupled with the invited presence of Mel Oliver, chair of the Membership Committee (MemCom), and ASPB President Roger Hangarter, MAC spent a great deal of time discussing ways in which the two committees might collaborate to facilitate productive and mutually beneficial relationships between scholars at minority serving institutions (MSIs) and those at larger universities. Two specific ideas that the committees will be implementing in the next few months include recruiting ASPB members to give broadly themed seminars at MSIs—at ASPB’s expense—and to work with the ASPB sectional societies (whose representatives to the ASPB Executive Committee [Excom] also serve on MemCom) to bring faculty and students from MSIs to sectional and national meetings. The MAC also selected Elma Gonzalez as the keynote speaker for its annual luncheon at the ASPB annual meeting. Gonzalez is the first recipient of UCLA’s Distinguished Teaching Award, which was given in recognition of her superb mentorship to undergraduate students engaged in research.

Early the next morning Excom got started on its ambitious agenda, which included both “action items” and a good number of formal reports, making steady progress through all of them during the day-long meeting. Pending your ratification of the necessary changes to the bylaws (and do please keep an eye out for these; they’ll be arriving within the next couple of weeks along with this year’s election ballots), MemCom will be “elevated” to a formal standing committee of the Society, an explicit recognition by the ASPB leadership of the critical importance of retaining current members and recruiting new ones. Gone are the times that ASPB can simply count on folk renewing their memberships until long after they retire.

In a similar recognition of the importance of members that reside outside the United States—approximately one-third of the membership now—the International Affairs Committee chair will (pending the membership’s ratification of the necessary bylaw changes) now sit on Excom, and discussions are under way to determine how best to establish representative participation in the Society’s affairs by ASPB’s growing international membership base.

One way in which the Society’s international members already make significant contributions is by attending ASPB’s annual meeting. As you know, this year’s meeting will be in Seattle July 16–20, and next year we’ll be meeting in Boston August 5 – 9. What you may not know is that these dates and venues are approved by Excom upon recommendation by the Society’s Program Committee, which works with members of the ASPB meetings staff to develop short lists of potential host cities for the meeting. In keeping with past years’ traditions and schedules, the Program Committee presented its recommendations for the 2007 meeting venue during the February Excom meeting, and I am delighted to report that the 2007 meeting will be held in downtown Chicago July 7–11. And just in case the prospect of a meeting in a grand old hotel close to the lake and museums in Chicago doesn’t excite you, this particular meeting is going to be even bigger and better than usual. That is because ASPB will be meeting jointly with the Botanical Society of America (BSA) and the three other organizations that participate in BSA’s annual meeting.

Because ASPB can save money by selecting meeting sites further in advance—and also circulate word of ASPB’s meeting in the plant biology community much sooner—the Program Committee is also working to make site selections for the 2008 through 2010 meetings. So, with a hard-to-beat proposal on the table from Hawaii, where the Society met in 2003, Excom also decided—at the Program Committee’s recommendation—to return to Hawaii for the 2009 meeting, which will take place July 18–22 in Honolulu.

Excom turned next to a bevy of items brought forward by the Publications Committee, which had discussed them extensively during its own meeting January 14. Perhaps the most notable and important items revolve around the issue of ethics in publishing and include a revision to the existing “Policies and Procedures for Handling Allegations of Author Misconduct” and approval of the new “Policies and Procedures for Handling Allegations of Editorial Misconduct” and the new “Conflicts of Interest” statement. All of these documents are available via links from an ethics page on the ASPB website (http://www.aspb.org/publications/ethics.cfm). Click here to see the story in this issue for further details..

Excom wrapped up in the early evening and repaired to its traditional post-meeting dinner at a nearby restaurant. However, several Excom members (as well as a few staff) had to be up early Sunday morning for the MemCom meeting, which began promptly at 8:00. Reciprocating MAC’s invitation to Mel Oliver, MemCom invited Anthony DePass to join its meeting, and Tony and Mel described for MemCom the MSI outreach activities MAC had discussed during its meeting the previous Friday. MemCom went on to take a long, hard look at membership numbers and trends and what kinds of things ASPB might do to recruit new members and retain existing ones.

More exciting than all that, though, was the notion that the bylaws enshrining MemCom’s new status as a standing committee of the Society would be drafted to create designated slots on MemCom for a graduate student and a postdoc! MemCom —and, indeed, Excom too—believe that finding ways to make sure students and postdocs have a voice in the Society’s governance is an extremely good idea, and this seems like an excellent place to start. So, again, watch out for the ballots that will include these proposed bylaws changes.

After a brief respite on Monday, the omnibus committee meetings resumed on Tuesday with the Committee on Public Affairs meeting. The committee went in some detail through the 2006 fiscal year budget requests from the USDA, NSF, and DOE—the principal funding agencies for basic plant science research in the United States—and then moved on to consider a proposal to establish a National Institute for Food and Agriculture. That was followed by a discussion of the serious potential ramifications for ASPB (and, indeed, many other professional societies) of the NIH’s new Public Access rule, about which much has already been written in this newsletter (click here, for example, the article in the Public Affairs section of this issue, as well as articles in the November/ December 2004 and January/February 2005 issues). Like MemCom, the Committee on Public Affairs is also interested in including graduate students and postdocs in its activities, and I look forward to working with the committee and its staff liaison, Brian Hyps, over the coming year to determine how best to make that happen.

After its meeting on Tuesday at the Gude Mansion, the Committee on Public Affairs headed to Capitol Hill on Wednesday for visits with congressional representatives and key appropriations subcommittee members before wrapping up an incredibly busy and productive week.

Lest you imagine, though, that the other committees of the Society have not been busy as well, please let me dispel that notion. The Women in Plant Biology Committee (WIPB) met on February 5 and, among many other things, defined the scope of the two career workshops that it is organizing for the Seattle meeting. Like MAC, WIPB has identified a speaker for the luncheon the committee hosts at the annual meeting: This year’s speaker will be Judy Verbeke of the National Science Foundation. WIPB has also recently completed a thorough revamp of its web pages (see http://www.aspb.org/committees/women/). Finally, shortly after the February 25–March 2 omnibus weekend, the Program Committee met on March 12 in Chicago (site of the 2007 Plant Biology meeting—or did I already mention that?) to review abstract submissions for this year’s meeting in Seattle. The committee has come up with an exciting and expanded list of mini-symposium topics for Plant Biology 2005, which you can view along with the rest of the preliminary schedule at http://www.aspb.org/meetings/pb-2005/schedule.cfm.

I hope that you, like me, will be greatly impressed by the level of engagement and commitment demonstrated by the (volunteer) members of all these ASPB committees. And I trust that their efforts, which are only outlined above, will convince you of the vibrancy of the organization and the enormous amount of work that its volunteer leaders and committee members are doing on behalf of the membership and the plant science community as a whole. In fact, two new members of Excom independently came up to me after the Saturday meeting to let me know how much they appreciated the effort put forth, how gratified they were to see such depth of knowledge and diligence, and how impressed they were by the group’s unselfish commitment to the greater good.

’Til next time…

Crispin Taylor
Executive Director
ctaylor@aspb.org