Biophysical Society Bulletin | July-August 2022

Council Update

Planning for the Future In June 2017, BPS Council convened in Charlottesville, VA, home of then-BPS-President Lukas Tamm , to create the Society’s first formal strategic plan. Sharing Knowledge in and about Biophysics, Fostering a Global Community, Supporting the Next Generation, and Advocating for Biophysics emerged as the strategic priorities. Scientific excellence; integrity and transparency; diversity, equity, and inclusion; and community building were the agreed upon values. That plan has been the guiding document for the majority of BPS activities for the past five years. While these priorities and values still resonate strongly for the Society, it is time to revisit, reassess, and re-envision the future for biophysics and BPS. To that end, we began a pre-strategic-planning process with a kickoff during New Council at the Annual Meeting in San Francisco in February. Shortly thereafter, we launched an all-member survey to get feedback on your priorities, levels of engagement, how you value the various programs and services provided by BPS, etc. We also surveyed Council, staff, and those who did not renew their membership for 2022. Three virtual focus groups were conducted in April and May enabling a deep dive into member priorities and anticipated trends in biophysics over the next few years. That feedback, along with a S.W.O.T. (strengths, weakness es, opportunities, and threats) and competitive analysis, informed the participants as a part of our second formal stra tegic planning session held during Spring Council in early June. Council and several senior staff gathered at the University of Madison–Wisconsin, BPS President Gail Robertson ’s home

institution, for two days of thought-provoking, challenging, and inspiring discussions. One of our first activities was to revisit the BPS mission and vision statements that were created in 2017. A mission statement is meant to describe an organization’s overall purpose and intent, while the vision statement is forward looking, inspirational, and aspirational, as to what we want to achieve. We felt that the existing statements needed some modifications to better express the purpose and aspirations of the organization in 2022 and beyond. Although not quite finalized, we look forward to sharing these with you in the coming months. Another exercise empowered Council to take stock of all that had been accomplished in support of the original plan: the initiation of the Ambassador Program, the introduction of Student Chapters, the launch of our gold open access journal Biophysical Reports , and the development of BPS Conferences, to name a few. While we are proud of the successes, we recognize that there is always more to do in support of our original strategic goals. After a establishing a solid understanding of BPS’s current state, we envisioned what biophysics and BPS could and would look like in 2030. We imagined biophysics as more interdisciplinary and integrated. We anticipated artificial intelligence and machine learning will have significant im pacts on biophysics (all science!). We envisioned information dissemination as more accessible, open, and transparent. Our thoughts about the future of our field were numerous and

July-August 2022

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