Message from the President

Sarah A. Woodin

I am sitting in Phoenix at the fall meeting of the core officers of SICB and can tell you that the venue for the January 2007 meeting is superb. The views of the mountains are of course lovely but additionally the meeting space is all on one floor with fast access to other rooms, lots of space in which to chat in the poster and exhibition hall, and numerous places to eat from very inexpensive to bring your gold card. Activities from ballet and theatre to basketball are within an easy stroll. I look forward to seeing you all here. The number of abstracts again is up this year at 1082; so, it should be a lively meeting with lots of new ideas and discussion.

In January we will be celebrating the emergence of the new Division of Comparative Biomechanics with a plenary lecture on January 3 to open the meeting by Mimi Koehl entitled "Putting the Organism in its Environment: Ecological Biomechanics" and a mini-symposium in honor of Steve Vogel. We will also be celebrating our first year as partners with Oxford University Press in publishing Integrative and Comparative Biology and the first year with Harold Heatwole as the new editor. I am sure all of you have been delighted, as I have been, with the quality of ICB and its new cover with spectacular graphics and photographs derived from the authors. It is nice to note that our citation rates are up significantly for ICB reflecting the quality of the articles from our symposia, which are the hub of our meetings. If you see John Edwards or other members of the Washington Consortium or Claudia deGruy who are the past guiding hands for the journal, please thank them for their part in this.