January 2018
Dear Members of the Society for Mathematical Biology,
Happy New Year! The beginning of a new year is an opportunity to set big goals and make new plans. SMB is gearing up for a number of exciting things, including the roll out of the new SMB newsletter, honoring members with awards, as well as planning for the SMB annual meeting in Sydney this July (SMB2018.org).
We are all extremely excited for the forthcoming newsletter to appear this winter. The format will be new and will appear as a Blog that will be integrated into the newly designed SMB website so all members can access it easily. This also reduces SMB’s environmental footprint, keeping with our philosophy. In addition, not having to mail a printed copy saves money for the society allowing us to keep our membership fee low.
The call is out for nominations for all of our SMB Prizes. Please visit www.smb.org/society-prizes/ and find out if you would like to nominate someone for one of these prizes (or get someone to nominate you!). Nominations for all awards have a March deadline so that the SMB Award Committee can evaluate nominations before the annual meeting in July, where the winners will be announced. Many of the prize winners will give a plenary lecture at the annual meeting in 2019 in Montreal. There are many prizes for both junior and senior faculty (including the new Fellows program), so I encourage you to explore the options. Here is a brief list:
-Akira Okubo Prize (junior version) (lecture in 2019)
– Arthur T. Winfree Prize (lecture in 2019)
– John Jungck Prize for Excellence in Education (lecture on the importance of Math biology education in 2019)
– Leah Edelstein-Keshet Prize winner (senior faculty version is awarded in alternating yers with the junior award)
-The Distinguished Service Award
-H. D. Landahl Mathematical Biophysics Award
-Society Fellows
Nominations for elected SMB positions are almost closed! The position of President-Elect is now coming due and we are soliciting names for nomination of the next President of the Society. If this is something you are interested in, please reach out to myself or one of the past SMB presidents to ask questions! In addition, three positions are opening on the Executive Board of Directors for the Society, so if you are interested in serving, or nominating someone, please do so as soon as possible!
We are currently in active Membership renewal mode. If you don’t want to be bothered with a yearly renewal, there is the option of becoming a lifetime member. We currently have 50 lifetime members. This is a fantastic option and shows your long-term commitment to the society and its principles. If you have not yet renewed your annual membership, we encourage you to do so as soon as possible so you will not lose any of the Society benefits, including access to the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology and significantly reduced rates to attend annual meetings.
Speaking of the Bulletin, I have asked our Editors-in-Chief, Dr. Reinhard Laubenbacher and Dr. Alan Hastings to write a brief note updating us on the Bulletin: “The Bulletin of Mathematical Biology had a banner year in 2017, with well over 300 submissions, and over 100 first-rate published manuscripts. We are consistently impressed with the high quality of work our community submits to the Bulletin and the effort and commitment to excellence of our editorial board and the many reviewers who volunteer their service, for which we are very grateful. As our readers may have noticed, we have expanded our editorial board in order to cover new and emerging themes in the quantitative life sciences, in particular medicine and public health, systems biology, multiscale modeling, control theory, statistics, and data science. We welcome your feedback, suggestions for new editorial board members, and any other thoughts about the journal.”
I wish you all a fantastic semester and hope to see all of you in Sydney!
Sincerely,
Denise Kirschner, Ph.D
President, SMB