Division of Ecology & Evolution (DEE): 2005 Fall Newsletter

In this newsletter:

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Message from the Chair Fred Janzen, Secretary Anthony Steyermark and Program Officer Emily Carrington

Your DEE officers hope that you all have had a productive summer and that your scholarly pursuits continue to go well. At the same time, we recognize the tremendous personal and professional disruptions recently suffered by our many colleagues in the Gulf Coast region and wish them all a speedy recovery.

We are looking forward to a great meeting in Orlando in January. This year DEE is co-sponsoring three symposia, one of which is a society-wide symposium:

1) "Ecological Immunology: Recent Advances and Applications For Conservation and Public Health"

2) "Integrating Function over Marine Life Cycles"

3) "Ecophysiology and Conservation: The Contributions of Energetics"

In addition, we will again be having our traditional joint social with the Division of Invertebrate Zoology and The Crustacean Society. The time and location will appear in the meeting schedule, so be sure to check it out. For those who haven't attended, these socials are a fun way to meet new acquaintances and to cement old friendships. See you there!

And don't forget to attend the DEE business meeting as well. We need your input and participation to keep DEE vibrant and in a leadership position within the Society. To that end, Tony and I have begun informally discussing how DEE can enhance student participation and foster cross-disciplinary interactions to help ensure a healthy long-term future for the Society. One way to more effectively promote the importance of SICB membership to our non-SICB ecological- and evolutionary-oriented colleagues and students is to incorporate novel activities at SICB meetings. For example, we might choose to implement an Adopt-A-Student program where a voluntarily matched pair of new student and SICB veteran exchange e-mail prior to the meeting, meet at the opening social, share a SICB- and/or DEE-supported meal together on the first day, or whatever seems best. Alternatively (or in addition), we might consider becoming more involved in targeted recruiting and support of specific individuals for Society membership and career guidance. Should we be pro-active in extending SICB's reach to new members from underrepresented groups and to engage these individuals in integrative and comparative scientific activities? Both student-oriented activities and research/education opportunities that focus on national priorities such as these will promote life-long membership in and commitment to SICB. Please provide your input on such ideas!

In this vein, please also continue to develop creative ideas for symposia to be held at future SICB meetings. DEE will support you. Here is one symposium possibility to spur your thinking: we might consider exploring the fast-growing roles of computational biology in our discipline. How much should we rely on computers? Will organismal biologists and natural historians, among others, be sidelined by this change of emphasis? Will/should we lament the loss of relatively noncomputational fields? We look forward to your ideas, so contact us directly or attend the business meeting!

This meeting will mark the completion of the first year of Fred's term as Chair and Tony's term as Secretary and the end of Emily's term as Program Officer. At the same time, we are pleased to announce the recent election of George Bakken as DEE Chair-Elect and Jennifer Elwood as DEE Program Officer-Elect. Jennifer will officially assume her office at the end of the meeting and George will do the same subsequent to the 2007 meeting in Phoenix.

As always we will be contacting you in the near future to ask if you would be willing to serve as a judge for the best student paper and poster competitions. We have had a great response from the members of the division for the last three years. Consequently, people have had to judge at most three presentations, and we have tried to match presentations with judges' areas of interest. So, please seriously consider serving as a judge for the student presentation at the next SICB meeting in Orlando.

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Link to officer list on DEE page