calacs

REPORT FROM THE ACS NATIONAL MEETING

San Francisco, CA, March 21-25, 2010

Highlights from the San Francisco meeting

Recent Spring ACS National meetings have tended to be smaller in attendance than the Fall meetings, with New Orleans and Salt Lake City having significantly lower attendance than Philadelphia and Washington in 2008 and 2009, respectively. However, those of us in the Bay area know that San Francisco is different than these other cities, and always commands an impressive turnout. This was true again this year, even with a continuing tough economy, with slightly over 18,000 people in attendance, almost 4000 more than last Fall’s meeting in DC. This made this meeting the third largest ACS meeting ever, with no surprise that the other two were also in San Francisco, albeit in better economic times.

Heard among members on the streets was a continuing positive feeling toward SF, with its attractive venues and major hotels close by the Convention Center that improves scheduling and cuts down on the need to use shuttle buses. In addition, I am not sure to whom we can give credit, but the weather was as good as we could hope for in what has been a fairly rainy year, except for a few sprinkles at the end of the poster sessions on Wednesday evening. (Overheard in the Exhibition area among several European visitors was the comment that, “if the weather is this good in March, imagine how nice it will be in the summer, and we must really come back during our vacation in July or August.” I felt that it was my duty to set them straight and let them know how July or August can be and the current weather was pretty much “as good as it gets.”)

The overall theme of the meeting was “Chemistry for a Sustainable World,” and there were over 1600 papers and posters across the various ACS Divisions and Presidential plenary events at the meeting related to this theme, including a Sunday evening key note address on Green Chemistry Solutions, followed by a reception and an early opening to the exhibition area.

Abstracts of the over 12,000 papers and posters presented at the meeting are still archived at www.acs.org and 300 of the plenary and symposium presentations were recorded and will be available with sequenced slides on the website to anyone after April 16^th.

Data from the ACS Career Fair at the SF meeting continues to reflect a challenging employment situation. Numbers reported by CEPA comparing the fall 2008 meeting in Philadelphia, the spring 2009 meeting in Salt Lake City, the Fall 2009 DC meeting, and the SF meeting for key indicators respectively are: Employers (80, 32, 38, 40), Positions (488, 176, 309, 116), Job seekers (1024, 504, 787, 1018).

Report from Society governance activities

California Local Section Councilors, our Board member, and our former ACS President  were very active in San Francisco in representing the section at numerous governance functions including the Board (Wu) and ACS committees: Committee on Committees (Balazs), Community Activities (Kanodia), Economic and Professional Affairs (Pavlath), Environmental Improvement (Nottoli), Local Section Activities (Latimer – Chair),  Membership Affairs (Frishberg), and Project Seed (Yamaguchi).

In addition to those named above, the other California section Councilors or substituting Alternate Councilors present at the Council Meeting were Alex Madonik,  and Jim Postma. Current CAL-ACS Section Chair, Paul Vartanian, impressed all of us by attending the entire Council meeting seated in the Visitors section.

Current ACS President, Joe Francisco, had a thorough initiation to the intricacies and challenges of dealing with Council, as he encountered several controversial topics and some contentious debate during this first Council meeting over which he presided.

The last several Council meetings have been highlighted by heated, and sometimes emotional, discussions of Constitution or Bylaws amendments dealing with proposed changes to the petition process for nominating candidates for ACS President that have become highly controversial. The energy behind these discussions resurfaced in SF.

For background, the current ACS Bylaws contain a provision for petition candidates to be placed directly on the ballot upon obtaining a certain number of supporting member signatures, with no other vetting by the Council or one of its committees. A fairly recent amendment increased the number of signatures needed to qualify as a petition candidate and that the signatures had to be more representative of ACS membership as a whole and not just from the Local Section or District from which the petition candidate resides.

A bylaws amendment offered at last fall’s Council meeting proposed that petition candidates for ACS President would be vetted and voted on by Council, along with the nominees brought forward by the Committee on Nominations and Elections, prior to being put on the fall election ballot for full member voting. This amendment was recommitted after a heated debate which was finally defused because the amendment also contained an apparently unrelated section dealing with shortening of the campaign period for national office, and it was judged that consideration should be given to having these two issues covered by two separate petitions.

An opposing amendment that was presented for urgent action last fall proposed a Constitutional amendment insuring the right of a petition candidate to go directly to the full membership election ballot, as is currently practiced but covered under the Bylaws, which are easier to change than the Constitution. While the urgent action petition did not receive the 75% vote needed to move it onto the DC Council agenda, it did show that Council was split fairly evenly on this subject, and put this petition in line for normal.  action at the Council meeting in SF. After more heated debate on both sides at the SF Council meeting, this petition was narrowly defeated by a vote of 46.9% yea, 53.1% nay, which means that the status quo holds as covered by the Bylaws and not the Constitution.

Time will tell whether this issue is settled for now or whether a revised form of last year’s recommitted amendment will resurface. To further appreciate the differences of opinions that have surfaced; one view is that the current petition process can be disruptive and that all potential candidates for ACS President should have the opportunity to present themselves to, and be vetted by and voted on by Council, and not be automatically placed on the ballot as is the case of the current petition candidate process. The other view is supportive of the status quo, considers that such a petition process is a fundamental process of a democratic society, and while it can be messy at times that is the nature of a democracy, and it has not resulted in any significant problems that would justify changing it. This view also considers it restrictive enough that a recent bylaws amendment has increased the number of signatures required to qualify a petition candidate.

Another petition that came to the Council floor for action was the revised petition on election timelines. The essence of this petition proposed shortening the timeframe of the election process for ACS President and District Directors by having the presentation of nominees and the vetting by Council shift from the Spring ACS meeting to the Fall meeting. This petition came about as former candidates for office, and potential nominees, have voiced concern over the current amount of time needed for campaigning for ACS office, and the petition being offered would reduce this to 2-3 months from the current 6-8 months. Already feisty from the debate on the previous bylaws amendment, this amendment also generated considerable discussion among Councilors. While appreciating the concerns of the former and future candidates, others felt that these were outweighed by other factors; those being the very short time to recover if a nominee had to withdraw late in the process (which indeed happened this year such that only three nominees were brought before Council, instead of the specified four), and that potential petition candidates would not know who they were running against before they had to go to the effort of obtaining signatures and filing their petitions (something that they might not choose to do depending on their knowledge of, and relationship with, the candidates emerging from the regular process). In the end the latter views prevailed and this amendment failed by a vote of 27.4% yea, 72.6% nay.

While most Committee reports to Council are fairly routine and rarely draw much comment once the amendments to the Constitution and Bylaws are dealt with, there was an exception this year as one of our very own California Section Councilors, Lee Latimer, ran into some heated comments and concerns following his first report to Council as the new Chair of the Local Section Activities Committee (LSAC). At issue were the recent changes in the ACS Speaker Service. As recently announced, the Speaker Service has gone on-line, with a refreshed list of speakers and much more background information on the speakers and their presentations than ever before. In addition, there is now the ability to connect directly with a speaker for a single visit scheduled at the time best for the speaker and Local Section involved, without having to take what was available as part of the traditional speaker tours. It is expected that this change will increase the number of speakers participating, as a speaker may be able to travel for a single presentation, but may not have been able to participate before since a traditional speaker “tour” would have required being away for most of a week. However, support from the National office in setting up multi-section speaker tours that offer a way of spreading out the travel and accommodation costs over several local sections and having a set cost to a local section for participating in a speaker’s tour is going away. It was this aspect of the change that drew the objections, with the primary concern being that the cost savings to the ACS National office, by no longer having a staff member assigned to run the Speakers Service, would shift the burden of more costs and volunteer time to arrange for speakers to the local sections, many of whom are struggling with funding and finding enough volunteers in the current economic climate to meet their current commitments already. LSAC is pledged to monitor these changes and work to institute appropriate corrections to the new system if necessary to insure that this is an overall positive change in this service. To somewhat ease the initial costs for the first speaker used by a local section under the new method in 2011, a $400 reimbursement will be offered upon a local section submitting expense receipts and a response to a survey following that speaker’s presentation (this plan was modified after the Council meeting to be a total of $400 allotted per local section for the year should a local section be able to stretch this funding to cover more than one speaker). Please refer to the ACS Comment section in the May 3, 2010 edition of C&EN for additional information on the Speaker Directory. The Speakers Service was used by 120 local sections last year.

In other Council action of note, the annual dues escalator was accepted which, due to the poor economy, calls for a dues increase of only one dollar for next year, and local section allotments from dues will remain the same.

Also, the bylaws amendment was approved to disband the Admissions Committee and assign its duties to the Membership Affairs Committee. This was in recognition of the reality that much of the work of the Admissions Committee was removed when membership categories were changed last year and the student member category was established.

The Membership Affairs Committee (MAC) reported that ACS membership had risen to 161,783 at year-end 2009, as compared with 154,024 at year-end 2008. Hidden within these numbers is a certain amount of membership volatility, as 21,762 new ACS members were added, while 20, 503 members were lost. Studies show that the highest rate of non-renewal of membership occurs within the first five years of joining the ACS, and significant efforts are ongoing within the National office and MAC to focus on this group, including yearly member recognition awards and emphasis on ACS member benefits such as the ACS insurance programs and affinity partners offering discounts for car, hotel, travel tours, credit cards, to name a few. This is also very much a local section issue, as getting new members involved and giving them a feeling of belonging at the local level should improve retention. The new student member group will surely add another dimension to these retention efforts, as the 2009 membership number reflects 6658 former Student Affiliates who were transitioned into the new Student Member category in June 2009, and the recruitment of 6341 new undergraduates as student members.

The Local Section Activities Committee has funded 33 new innovative program grants worth $67,000 so far this year. The new grant program, named “Bridging the Gap,” that was initiated to provide up to $250 to help support local section events to help attract more student members received 68 requests in 2009.

A Board-Presidential Task Force has been initiated, with membership from many ACS committees, on the subject of Society services and associated dues pricing models.

The Joint Task Force of the Society Committee on Education and the Membership Affairs Committee will report by the end of the year on its investigations regarding how the ACS can better help meet the needs of pre-college chemistry teachers.

A Presidential Task Force has been set up, with George Whitesides as the chair, on the subject of generating job opportunities for chemists through entrepreneurship.

Looking ahead to Boston – August , 2010

The overall meeting theme will be “Chemistry for Preventing and Combating Disease.”

The Committee on Science sponsored programming will focus on Alternative Energy Systems.

News you might use

In addition to the usual employment information, the ACS Careers website (www.acs.org/careers) now includes retirement planning resources and services for unemployed ACS members. Remember that ACS membership dues can be waived for up to two years for eligible unemployed members in good standing. Also, ACS National meeting registration fees are waived for unemployed members, and fees for short courses and Regional meetings are reduced.  Career forums can be accessed through this website the 2^nd Thursday of each month, and a webinar of interest to industrial members within small businesses continues to be scheduled for the 4^th Thursday of each month.

The Office of Public Affairs has launched a new program called Chemistry Ambassadors to assist ACS members who are interested in public outreach. Similar to the VIP program of years ago, tools, tips, and other resources can be found at www.acs.org/chemistryambassadors.

Efforts continue to prepare for the United Nations designated International Year of Chemistry in 2011. To keep tabs of the many ACS activities that will be developed in coordination with this event, go to IYC2011@acs.org.

The theme for NCW to be held Oct. 17-23 is “Behind the Scenes Chemistry.” During the SF meeting, members of the California Section were able to meet with Marvin Lang, Professor Emeritus from the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, who, with Don Showalter, are known as one of the premier teams performing chemical demonstrations around the country of interest to all ages. CAL-ACS has scheduled them to perform a series of demonstration programs around our Section and the neighboring Santa Clara Valley Section throughout the week of NCW. Stay tuned for further announcements regarding dates and venues.

The ACS Member’s Network now has 22,000 members. There are plans to upgrade the network this summer to make it more inclusive and effective by changing its enrollment approach from an opt-in to an opt-out system and putting all ACS members into the network to start. Please be aware that CAL Section Councilor and Chair-Elect, Bryan Balazs has set up a California Section group within this network.

There is now an ACS mobile application for I-phone in which a member can access Division information and C&EN.

While National Lab Day may only be a single day for observance, some of the projects that it has engendered will continue and the website www.nationallabday.org will still be active for those members interested in seeing if there are any ongoing projects in our area to which they may want to participate.

The 2012 International Chemistry Olympiad will be held in the US after many years absence. This will be the 44^th IChO and will be held at the Univ. of Maryland, College Park campus, with Caltech’s Ahmed Zewail (1999 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry) as President of this IChO. California Section Councilor Bryan Balazs is chair of the organizing committee. The committee for preparing the exams for 2012 has been established and Bryan is busy pulling together the Planning Committee, which handles the logistics, meals, housing, tours, meeting venues, cultural issues, and the many other aspects of such an international endeavor.

Interesting Statistics

By the end of 2010, it is expected that Student Members will number 12,000.

There are approximately 1000 High School teachers who are members of the ACS.

Of the 12,000 papers and posters presented at this ACS National meeting, over 50% came from outside of the US for the first time.

Of new ACS members, 70% join on-line, while 35% renew their membership on-line.

The number of High School Chemistry Clubs chartered by the ACS is now 258.

There were seven Regional meetings in 2009 with a total attendance of 5108 and 3083 papers presented.

Submitted by Mark Frishberg, CAL-ACS Councilor