POLY Councilor’s Report – San Francisco 2010

At the San Francisco National Meeting (March 21-25, 2010), POLY was represented at the ACS Council by Bill Daly, H. N. Cheng, John Pochan, and Diana Gerbi.  The following account summarizes some selected activities in the committees and groups that POLY Councilors are involved in.
 

Division Activities Committee (DAC) - John Pochan

a. Electronic dissemination of meeting talks.  This will continue at Boston in an expanded form. An ACS task force is now focused on business models and policy aspects of the effort. Bill Daly will serve on the task force. These policy aspects include the touchy topic of whether journals would regard these public presentations as a publication prior to submission to them.  POLY continues to support this effort. 

Thematic programming. Themes for the next five national meetings are as follows:

• Fall 2010 Boston - Chemistry for Combating and Prevention Disease; 
• Spring 2011 Anaheim - Chemistry of Natural Resources;
• Fall 2011 Denver - Chemistry of Air, Space and Water;
• Spring 2012 San Diego - Chemistry of Life; 
• Fall 2012 Philadelphia  - Materials for Health and Medicine.  The Philadelphia meeting is an ideal venue for a POLY member to be thematic chair for the meeting.  If you know of someone you feel would be apropos  for this effort, please contact  John Pochan (johnpochan@hotmail.com ). Nominations for other future meetings are also welcome.

b. An accolade for the division. Three cheers for the POLY/PMSE effort of combining poster sessions with oral sessions. This is considered a best practice by MPPG and will be recommended to other divisions as a better way to handle posters. 
 

Committee on Meetings & Expositions (M&E) - Bill Daly

a. The reviews on the ACS meeting in Washington (August 2009) were generally quite good, but the discontinuation of mid-day shuttle service was not well received.  Full day service will be provided at future national meetings.

b. The next meeting planned for Washington, Spring 2014, was moved to Dallas, Texas.  The dates of the spring meeting coincided with the Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington with a resulting escalation in hotel prices.  Meeting room access was also too limited to support all the technical sessions.  Dallas has completed a new convention center and now appears to be a very attractive location.

c. San Francisco abstracts totaled 12064 making it impossible to hold all the technical sessions in the convention center so the goal of having the meeting in a single location was not achieved.

d. The new Program and Abstract Creation System (PACS) is proving to be a challenge to implement.  The problems with PACS impact the publication of Polymer Preprints on the ACS web site.  ACS staff has been encouraged to solve these problems ASAP.

e.  Several divisions chose not to program on Thursday afternoon.  POLY and ORG did not program at all on Thursday.  Analysis of the impact of this experiment reflects a decrease in Wednesday session attendance and no consistent trend in hotel occupancy.   
 
Society Committee on Education, SOCED (H. N. Cheng)

a. SOCED aims to support the development and implementation of ACS education programs and develop reports and recommendations to the ACS Board and Council that help define ACS’ policies on issues relating to chemical education for the strategic development of current and future ACS educational activities and the support of science education reform nationwide. 

b. At San Francisco SOCED looked at a number of opportunities relating to both pre-college and higher education.  Topics of discussion included undergraduate general chemistry curriculum, quantity and quality of high school chemistry teachers, and ACS science education policy statement.
 

Senior Chemists Task Force (H. N. Cheng, Bill Daly)

In 2009 the ACS Committee on Committees (ConC) established the Senior Chemists Task Force, which is designed to function as the focal point for senior chemists (those over the age of 50) within the ACS and the chemistry enterprise at large.  It serves at least four roles: 1) To encourage and serve as a conduit for senior members to volunteer and contribute their energy and talent to the ACS, including governance, education, mentoring, and community projects;   2) To provide useful service and information to seniors, such as retirement and estate planning, consulting and part-time opportunities, and travels/tours;  3)  To foster networking opportunities among seniors, both nationally and locally;  4) To represent senior chemists to interact with other elements of ACS governance, bringing awareness of their needs, fostering collaborations, and creating synergies.  Eli Pearce is the Task Force chair.  If you are interested in getting involved, please let Bill Daly or H. N. Cheng know.

Intersociety Polymer Education Council, IPEC (Diana Gerbi)
 
IPEC is a non-profit organization of polymer-related professional societies that promotes and supports teaching about polymers and polymeric materials in K-12 curricula. Most of IPEC's activity involves the Polymer Ambassadors. They conduct workshops at local, regional and national teachers' meetings, where the Ambassadors teach other teachers to use polymers in classroom instruction. Discussions at the San Francisco meeting included funding issues, Rubber Division not currently supporting IPEC, Polymer Ambassadors going from 2 meetings per year to 1 meeting per year, updating IPEC website, and linking to the current Polymer Ambassadors website.

Other Items of Interest

1)  ACS membership totaled 161,783 at year-end 2009, compared to 154,024 at year-end 2008.  The number of registrants at the San Francisco meeting was 18,076.   

2)  The ACS Leadership Development System (LDS) offers many face-to-face and on-line courses.  Anyone interested can sign up to take them at www.acs.org/leaderdevelopment