The View from the Gude Mansion…Déjà vu All Over Again

Crispin Taylor

At about this time last year, I wrote about an intense week of ASPB committee meetings that took place in late February and early March at the ASPB headquarters in the Gude mansion (see http://www.aspb.org/newsletter/marapr05/02view.cfm). Well, guess what? The Society’s leadership, committees, and staff just did it again! From where I’m sitting, this kind of activity – busy committees doing the hard work of the Society – is pretty much business as usual. However, for anyone who is not (or has not been) engaged with a committee or its areas of influence and interest (or who is not an avid reader of the ASPB News), I expect that the work that these always dedicated and occasionally passionate volunteers do for the Society – and therefore for you as members of ASPB – may fly somewhat below the radar screen. Hopefully, this brief synopsis of their work over the past couple of months will go some way toward raising the profile of the committees’ work – and perhaps even encourage some of you to seek to get more deeply involved than you have been able to do to date.

We – committee members, ASPB president Michael Thomashow, past-president Roger Hangarter, staff liaisons, and I – began with something of a warm up in mid-January, with back-to-back meetings of the Publications and Women in Plant Biology committees. The bulk of the Publications Committee’s marathon meeting (it went over 11 hours!) was taken up with a vital discussion of the opportunities and challenges presented to ASPB and its journals by the rapidly evolving landscape of scholarly publishing, including various approaches toward Open Access. In addition to these weighty conversations, the committee voted to recommend modifications to Plant Physiology’s policies and charges regarding color figures that had been proposed by Editor-in-Chief Don Ort, changes that were subsequently approved by the Society’s Executive Committee (Excom) and that will take effect in 2007. Finally, the Publications Committee moved forward (and Excom also passed) a request for funds to continue for another three years ASPB’s partnership with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and its Mass Media Science and Engineering Fellowship Program (http://www.aaas.org/programs/education/MassMedia/index.shtml). Through this program, ASPB members who are aspiring science communicators participate in intense 10-week fellowships with mass media outlets in the United States.

The following day, members of the Women in Plant Biology Committee spent considerable time and energy reviewing the generally very positive feedback from events the committee convened at last year’s annual meeting in Seattle – the luncheon talk given by NSF program director Judy Verbeke, for example, and the ever-popular career workshops. The committee also worked on the wording for an upcoming brochure highlighting its activities before turning its attentions to this coming year’s events at Plant Biology 2006 in Boston. This meeting will see a reprise of the popular luncheon and career workshops. As was the case in Seattle, one of the latter will focus on academic careers, and the other will focus on – well, everything else!

After a month-long pause, the committee meeting roundrobin resumed with a subcommittee of the ASPB Minority Affairs Committee (MAC). The group met on Thursday, February 23, to finalize the details of a comprehensive proposal that is focused on training and development of faculty and students from underrepresented groups, many of whom study and work at smaller colleges and universities that have higher minority enrollments and that are historically less likely to be represented at ASPB. The proposed outcomes would include an increase in the visibility of plant sciences at these minority serving institutions (MSIs) and a concomitant increase in the participation of individuals from underrepresented minorities as members and as contributors to the Society’s scholarly activities (i.e., as presenters at annual meetings and as authors in both journals). The proposal, which builds off and significantly extends MAC-organized activities already funded by the Society, will be submitted for consideration by the federal government later this spring.

The full committee met the following day, Friday, joined again by presidents Hangarter and Thomashow. Like the Women in Plant Biology Committee, MAC ran through the activities in which the committee had engaged since the beginning of the Seattle meeting, which, in addition to MAC-supported programs at Plant Biology 2005, included participation at the annual meeting of the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science (better known as SACNAS; see http://www.sacnas.org/) and the Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minorities in Science (ABRCMS; http://www.abrcms.org/). The committee then turned to the upcoming Boston meeting and the business of selecting a speaker for the MAC-sponsored luncheon. Also on the agenda was discussion of the MAC Symposium – Medicinal Plants and Ethnobotany – which will be held on Monday afternoon, August 7th (check out the full preliminary program for PB2006 at http://www.aspb.org/meetings/pb-2006/schedule.cfm) and the MAC Recognition Travel Awards (more to follow in a subsequent issue of the ASPB News).

MAC members mingled with arriving Excom members and ASPB staff over dinner Friday evening. And early Saturday morning, staff ferried Excom from the hotel to ASPB HQ for the weekend’s main event – the Excom meeting. Filling an entire day to execute the serious business of the Society, Excom moved on the abovementioned “action items” coming out of the Publications Committee and also spent time deliberating next steps in developing the Society’s strategic plan, as well as new publishing models and the Society’s approach toward them. At the Program Committee’s behest, Excom also discussed the parameters the Society might best use to evaluate proposals for “specialty” meetings and also the pros and cons of identifying city venues and dates for ASPB annual meetings some years into the future. The Excom meeting filled the day completely, and committee members repaired directly to a nearby Italian restaurant for a well-earned (and evidently very well liked!) family-style dinner.

Taking advantage of the presence of its ad hoc section representative members, who sit on Excom, the newly reconstituted Membership Committee met on Sunday. In addition to the section reps, the chairs of both the MAC and the International Affairs committees participated at MemCom’s invitation, along with appointed committee members, including the graduate student member, Colleen Doherty, and chair Mel Oliver. MemCom’s agenda was ambitious and far reaching, including (among many other things) the “Get

Six in ’06” member recruitment campaign, more effective outreach with and through the ASPB sections, further improving networking opportunities at the annual meeting in Boston, a drive to increase the visibility and impact of ASPB among plant biology graduate students, and the appropriate range and scope of member benefits that ASPB negotiates with third-party vendors.

Like WIPB, MemCom managed to wrap up its business early on Sunday afternoon, and those of us who had been participating since the get-go – including the presidents – took the opportunity to grab a little downtime. On Monday, though, the Public Affairs Committee – including for the first time ever a graduate student participant, Jeff Gordon of Cornell University – convened for its meeting, prior to spending a day in congressional visits on Tuesday. In addition to preparing for Tuesday’s Capitol Hill visits, the Public Affairs Committee spent Monday discussing President Bush’s recently announced American Competitiveness Initiative and what it might mean for plant biology (and plant biologists) in the United States. The committee also worked through the proposed 2007 budgets for the Department of Energy, the Department of Agriculture, and the National Science Foundation – all agencies that support basic plant biology research; identified a number of ways in which the Public Affairs website should be improved; and assessed a number of opportunities through which the Society might help produce short radio (or even TV) news spots designed to promote plant biology to the public at large.

Finally, the ASPB Education Committee stole a bit of a march on many of the Society’s other committees – at the same time as neatly avoiding the possibility of interference by Mother Nature – by holding its mid-winter meeting by conference call in early January. Committee chair Mary Williams (who also participated in February’s Excom meeting) and committee members, along with Mike Thomashow, discussed possible joint educational outreach opportunities with the Botanical Society of America, an upcoming NSF-funded (and ASPB-hosted) workshop on “broader impacts,” a planned workshop with Boston-area schoolteachers in advance of the Society’s 2006 annual meeting, and the committee’s (and staff’s) involvement in outreach to school science teachers via their own professional conferences.

Clearly, ASPB members can rest assured that their elected leaders are working hard on their behalf, as this description of our winter meetings marathon attests! Now, the committees and staff will turn to the work defined and discussed at these meetings, and will meet again in the summer in Boston to both look back over their recent achievements and forward to plan next steps – for them, and for the Society.

’Til next time…

Crispin Taylor
Executive Director
ctaylor@aspb.org