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SICB


Division of Ecology and Evolution (DEE) - Fall 2000 Newsletter

Message from the DEE Officers
Sally Woodin, Linda Walters, and Brian Helmuth

We are looking forward to the 2001 SICB Annual Meeting in Chicago, January 3-7. The symposia and their dates are now available on the new SICB homepage (http://www.sicb.org) and look very exciting. As was true of the meeting in Atlanta, the breadth of the Society is obvious from the symposia which range from 'Lesser Known Protostome Taxa: Evolution, Development and Ecology' to 'Ontogenetic Strategies of Invertebrates in Aquatic Environments' to 'Plant/Animal Physiology' to 'Starting from Fins: Parallelism in the Evolution of Limbs and Genetalia'. At least two symposia directed at teaching are also on the schedule. The symposia for Anaheim in 2002 are being finalized and one or more may be co-sponsored by the Ecological Society. Now is the time to be thinking about symposia for 2003 and relaying those ideas to Brian Helmuth, the DEE Program Officer (helmuth@biol.sc.edu).

As at the 2000 meeting, papers will be grouped by topic rather than by division. This resulted in fewer conflicts for attendees and those at the DEE business meeting thought it worked well. Remember the DEE business meeting is open to ALL members, student and non-student. It is where you tell your officers what is right and what is wrong both with DEE and with SICB as a whole. For example, it was clear from comments at the last business meeting that members wanted to receive their newsletter both as text pasted into an email message as well as on the SICB homepage. As a result we will be sending this to you as email.

Students please sign up for this year's presentation judging! Faculty and post-docs, please contact Linda Walters (DEE Secretary) at ljwalter@pegasus.cc.ucf.edu to sign up to help judge presentations. It is an excellent way to support DEE and SICB, looks wonderful on the community service portion of your annual evaluation form, and helps students understand what worked and what did not in their presentation. Judges typically are responsible for three to five talks. Thank you in advance.

This year was a sorrowful year in one aspect for DEE. Longtime researcher Ruth Turner passed away as did two much younger colleagues, Gary Polis and Tom Frost. All will be missed. Gary, in particular, was very active in SICB. There was a wonderful symposium entitled 'Linking Communities Across Ecosystem Boundaries' in his honor at the Ecological Society Meetings at Snowbird in August.