Biophysical Society Bulletin | January 2024

President’s Message

So What Does A President Do? I often get asked by students and colleagues some variation of the question: "What is it like to serve as President of the Biophysical So ciety?" A short answer is: "It is not a huge time commitment, but the President does have some power to enact positive changes." The

2. PUI Faculty Award. We want to honor excellence in academic research and mentoring by faculty at a primarily undergraduate institution (PUI), a source of a great number of current and future biophysicists. 3. Early Independent Career Award. This award is for those who have led their own independent research group for fewer than six years and will be based on their contributions during their independence. Accommodations will be made to account for pauses in careers due to child rearing or other reasons. 4. Outstanding Doctoral Research in Biophysics Award. Nominations will require an essay by the nominee explaining their thesis research to a broad audience with scientific inter est. One winner from a U.S.-based institution and one winner from a non-U.S.-based institution will be chosen. 5. Agnes Pockels Award in Lipids and Membrane Biophysics. The Avanti Award in Lipids, awarded since 1997, will be renamed after Agnes Pockels, who determined the size of single lipid molecules and built the precursor for the Lang muir-Blodgett trough. We hope you nominate yourself or other deserving candi dates for these awards (the deadline is May 1, 2024). Our most recent initiative is the Sustainable Future Task Force. President-Elect Gabriela Popescu kindly agreed to chair the task force, which will recommend steps that BPS should take to empower our members who would like to apply their skills and expertise to research related to a sustainable future. They will also look into how to align BPS activities with the goal of achieving a sustainable future. We look forward to taking concrete steps, based on their recommendations, to harness the full potential of biophysics to preserve the planet for future generations! Other responsibilities of the President I will mention are to name the BPS Lecturer and to appoint the Program Chairs for the next Annual Meeting. Elizabeth Villa and Ibrahim Cissé are the Program Chairs who put together an exciting and forward-looking program for the upcoming 2024 Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, and Carolyn Bertozzi , 2022 Nobel lau reate in Chemistry, will give the BPS Lecture. Her lecture on the Monday evening of the Annual Meeting will be followed by a dance and ice cream social (back for the first time since 2020!). Finally, at the Annual Meeting we will also present another exciting lineup of speakers at the President’s Sympo sium on Black in Biophysics. I cannot wait to welcome you to Philadelphia! — Taekjip Ha , President

President presides over BPS Council meetings, held three times a year. Because of the outstanding staff in

Taekjip Ha

the Society office who can turn our decisions into reality, the Council can focus on strategic thinking. We make a conscien tious effort at this by reminding ourselves, at the beginning of Council meetings, of our strategic plan objectives: foster a diverse and inclusive global community, invest in the future of biophysics, enhance the sharing of knowledge, and advocate for biophysics. A great example of a Council-directed initiative that has been put into practice during my term is the three programmatic changes to the Annual Meeting, all designed to increase pre sentation opportunities. First, we created a fifth speaking slot in our symposia, which in the past had four invited speakers for each. These 20+ "Symp Select" speakers are chosen from the abstracts submitted. The response from our member ship was incredible: more than 400 abstracts were submit ted for Symp Select talks from principal investigators of all career stages, from brand new professors to members of the National Academies. Second, those who give 15-minute platform talks are given the option of also presenting a post er. This year, it will add more than 200 presentations to the poster sessions. Third, we added flash talks to the platform sessions. This increased the number of platform speakers by 25%. We hope the additional scientific content will also add to the value of our annual meetings. The Council also just approved the creation of four new awards and the renaming of an existing award. Our motiva tion was to honor the scientific excellence of our members by more fully representing the diversity of research topics, career stages, and geographic locations of our members. The new and renamed awards are: 1. Klaus Schulten and Zaida Luthey-Schulten Computational Biophysics Lecture Award . We thank Zaida Luthey-Schulten, who donated funds to endow this award. This is the only award that comes with a speaking opportunity (as a Symp Select Speaker), which we hope will bring additional visibility.

January 2024

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