2010 Committee Reports:
2010 Fall ACS National Meeting in Boston

August 21-26, 2010

Business Office

Councilor’s Report

Membership Committee

Polymer Preprints

Polymer Preprint Circulation
Regional Meetings

Treasurers Report

BUSINESS OFFICE

Lesia Linkous

 The Business Office provided administrative support to four meetings and workshops during 2009 (total overhead received for 2009 meetings to date is $69.1 K), and 1 to date for 2010 (total overhead received for 2010 to date is estimated at more than $20,000.00).  POLY co-sponsored Polymer Composite Matrix Science Workshop held February 8 – 9, 2010 in New Orlean.  The business office was used as a tool for advertising, including web link.  Four repeat workshops are approved for 2011 is one proposed for 2012 to date.   The Business office will be actively involved with the 2010 PacificChem Conference, providing support to organizers comparable to a national ACS Meeting.

 The 2010 Spring issue of the Polymer Division Newsletter was mailed out to the membership in June.  The next Newsletter is drafted and will be mailed out in October.  Suggestions for changes and additional articles for the Spring issue can be accepted through September 7.  A minimum of twelve companies continue to advertise in the POLY Newsletter, contributing +$16K to defray Newsletter expenses.

 The election ballot information was included with the October 2009 with the Newsletter.  Electronic balloting was implemented in 2008 increasing the total ballots received to 1,228.  Electronic balloting for Fall 2009 elections resulted in 1,029 responses, comparable to the previous year, yet reflecting The Division’s slight drop in memberships.

 The Business Office is involved in several membership activities.  The POLY membership booth is set up near the POLY sessions at the Westin Waterfront in Boston.  In addition to recruiting new members, CD’s are available for sale at a cost of $5 each for those that wish to gain access by CD in addition to the web version that is available to all POLY members.  Annual membership recognition pins were sent out in March 2010. 

 The Business Office staff works closely with several committees of the Polymer Chemistry Division.  Financial records are maintained on the Industrial Sponsors activities including invoicing companies as appropriate. Various mailings are sent out to these Sponsors throughout the year.  An up-to-date mailing list is maintained on all CD libraries that subscribe to the Polymer Preprints.  This number decreased from 202 in 2008 to 135 to date in 2009 due to the availability of electronic Preprint access to libraries through ACS. Little to no change has been reported for 2010 at present.   We have assisted with several award and recognition efforts for the Division members to include the new POLY Fellows Award.  The Business Office continues to work with the Treasurer on implementation of the budget.

POLY – Councilor’s Report Boston 2010

Bill Daly, H. N. Cheng, John Pochan, and Diana Gerbi
 

At the Boston National Meeting (August 22-26, 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)/MPPG - John Pochan

Divisional Activities Committee (DAC) approved 15 Innovative Project Grant (IPG) proposals from 13 divisions totaling $102,400.  DAC will consider another set of IPG proposals at the Anaheim national meeting in March.  In order to have their proposals considered by DAC in Boston, divisions must submit them no later than February 1.

Operating as a DAC subcommittee, the Multidisciplinary Program Planning Group (MPPG) has approved the following themes for upcoming national meetings:

• For the Spring 2013 meeting in New Orleans: “Chemistry of Energy and Food”
• For the Fall 2013 meeting in Indianapolis: “Chemistry in Motion”

As a reminder, the theme for the 2011 national meeting in Anaheim is “Chemistry of Natural Resources.”

Progress is being made to improve the Program and Abstract Creation System (PACS), which has proven to be difficult for a significant number of division program chairs and session organizers to use to organize the San Francisco and Boston meetings.   The majority of the shortcomings in this software have been fixed already, and nearly all of them will be ameliorated in time for use in organizing the Spring 2011 meeting in Anaheim.  Face-to-face training sessions for the revised version of PACS are being held here in Boston with program chairs and session organizers, and a number of webinars will be run throughout the fall.  DAC will closely monitor this matter.

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

The Boston meeting was successful from the point of view of attendance (over 14,059) and programming (7960 papers and posters).  The attendees included 8,211 regular attendees, 3,230 students and 1,492 exhibitors.  Over 90 % of the technical sessions were held in the convention center.  In contrast, the San Francisco meeting (Spring 2010) was even more successful, with a registration of 18,064 attendees including 10,201 regular attendees, 5,714 students and 1,223 exhibitors. The reviews on the San Francisco meeting were exceptional: greater than 95% of the participants recommended that we return to San Francisco.   

In Anaheim (March 2011) the Sunday Exposition hours will be dropped at the meeting.
 

Electronic Distribution of Meeting Content Task Force (EDMC) – Bill Daly

At this meeting close to 400 of presentations were recorded. Authors of about 60% of the papers designated for recording agreed to allow their talks to be posted.  Anyone who registered for the meeting will have access to the talks recorded in Boston talks after September 10, 2010.  General public access to these talks will be opened on September 24, 2010.  The recorded talks including those from San Francisco are available to at www. softconference.com/ACSchem/.  EDMC plans to discuss the prior publication concerns regarding posting of meeting content with editors of ACS journals and a financial model to support the program.

Society Committee on Education (SOCED) – H. N. Cheng

SOCED aims to inform and guide the ACS on science education and policy issues, and support the development and implementation of education activities of the ACS and its Education Division.    Some relevant topics discussed at Boston are given below:

1)  A survey of high school chemistry teachers has been conducted to assess the need for and interest in a national association of high school chemistry teachers. 
2)  An effort is being made to determine the possibility of engaging and supporting two-college programs.  A survey has just been conducted on two-year college faculty.  (Note that an earlier 4-year college faculty survey was conducted in 2009.)
3)  SOCED approved a revised policy statement on scholarship.  A revised policy statement on science education is underway. 

Other topics included promotion of green chemistry in educational curricula, Chemistry Olympiad, and update of Education Division activities.

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

At Boston the Senior Chemists Breakfast had a full-house audience with Nobelist Roald Hoffmann as the speaker.  He spoke on “Ethics and Science, a Marriage of Necessity and Choice for the New Millennium.”  In addition, there were three other scheduled events:
1) Symposium on Senior Chemists Interface with Local, State, and National Government, cosponsored by PROF; 
2) Symposium on “Connections to Germany and Europe: Education and Research Opportunities”, cosponsored by CHED;
3) Medicare Supplement Workshop, cosponsored by ACS Member Insurance Board of Trustees.  Eli Pearce is the Task Force chair and George Heinze co-chair.  If you are interested in getting involved, please let Bill Daly or H. N. Cheng know.
 
Industrial Advisory Board (IAB) -Diana Gerbi

The Industrial Advisory Board met on August 24, 2010 at the Boston ACS Meeting. The group’s mission is to bring strategic amplification of the ACS Polymer Division’s industrial voice in programming, education and award recognition. A new POLY student award, sponsored by DSM, has been approved. A report on the 8th National Graduate Research Polymer Conference held the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, June 6-9, was presented.  Results of the IAB member companies’ survey were reviewed to determine how POLY can be of value to industrial members. Data will be used to identify and initiate changes in programming and networking. This survey will serve as a base for constructing a larger POLY member survey.

Other Items of Interest

1) At Boston, the Board of Directors voted to approve an advance member registration fee of $355 for national meetings held in 2011.
2) The number of Student Members at ACS was 12,815 as of July 31, 2010. 
3) The ACS Council voted to continue the Committee on Science, pending approval by the Board of Directors.
4) The ACS Leadership Development System (LDS) offers many courses on leadership training.  Anyone interested can sign up to take them at www.acs.org/leaderdevelopment
5) John Pochan will serve as Chair of Division Activities Committee in 2011; H. N. Cheng has been elected by Council to serve in Committee of Committee in 2011.

MEMBERSHIP COMMITTEE
Dr. Mary Ann Meador

 The membership committee currently has three major activities on-going.  First, because we recognize that students are the future of our organization, we are conducting a drive to increase the number of POLY student chapters at universities.  There is a new website linked to the POLY home page describing how to start and run a student chapter.   Four new schools have already requested information and expressed an interest.  Coming soon will be a call for proposals for student chapters to capture seed funding from POLY for hosting an event at their school.  

 Second, a Member-get-a-member drive was kicked off at the Boston meeting.  Recommend a colleague for membership in POLY.  If they join before December 31, you will receive a free $5 Starbucks coffee card and your name will be entered into a drawing for fabulous prizes.  For more information, see the  Member-get-a-member-link on the POLY Home page.  Coming in January, look for more membership drive special events.
 Finally, we will be conducting a membership survey in September to assess what members think about POLY and how we can improve.  A link to the survey will arrive by email to all POLY members in a couple weeks. 

POLYMER PREPRINTS
Reddy Venumbaka, Editor

 Polymer Preprints issue [51 (2), 2010] represents the fifth issue to be offered exclusively online and is added to our growing web library on MIRA Digital Publishing company’s web-server. This issue of Polymer Preprints and the previous issues [Vol. 49 (2), Vol. 50 and Vol. 51 (1)] are available online at: http://submissions.miracd.com/acspolymer  as well as through the ACS website. POLY members may access the content online at anytime using their user ID and a password.

 It is also the second issue to be submitted, retrieved, and posted through the ACS Program and Abstract Creation System (PACS). We are working with staff at ACS to alleviate the difficulties this transition may have caused. ACS continues to be accommodating and accepting of our evaluation of the new systems’ short-comings.

 This issue contains 421 preprints published on 766 pages. As we continually strive to elevate the stature of Preprints in the world of scientific publishing, we would appreciate hearing opinions and/or requests regarding accessibility and utilization of the online version as an aid in making improvements to future issues. Texas State University-San Marcos continues to sustain the in-kind support of the Polymer Preprints editorial functions. We will be requesting funding at a level of $18,000/year.

 The following table outlines the publication costs for Preprints:

POLYMER PREPRINT CIRCULATION
Fred Dammont

We have shipped a total of 125 copies of Polymer Preprints, Vol. 51.2, in CD-ROM format, to fully paid up and complimentary accounts for the current year.  All overseas shipments were sent by AIR MAIL (including 2 by registered air mail- we charged for this service $30 extra) Domestic shipments were sent by USPS First Class mail, with confirmed Delivery service, for which we absorb the extra cost, to addresses where we have previously encountered delivery problems.  This eliminated most claims.

REGIONAL MEETINGS:
Warren Ford

 The recipient of the 2010 AkzoNobel Award for Outstanding Graduate Research in Polymer Chemistry is Dr. Haifeng Gao, who received his doctorate in 2008 from Carnegie Mellon University under the direction of Professor Krzysztof (Kris) Matyjaszewski, and is now a postdoctoral researcher in Professor Jean M. J. Fréchet’s group in University of California, Berkeley.

 Haifeng Gao’s Ph.D. dissertation focused on the development of new synthetic methodologies for preparation of functional polymers with controlled architectures using atom transfer radical polymerization (ATRP) of divinyl crosslinkers with monovinyl monomers. The structure of the polymers can be varied from soluble stars containing a crosslinked core and linear radiating arms to highly branched copolymers and/or insoluble gels by simply changing the polymerization sequence of the monomer and the crosslinker. He devised a general method for synthesis of miktoarm star copolymers with controlled structures and freely varied arm compositions and arm ratios by one-pot crosslinking of a mixture of linear arm precursors, including both macromonomers and macroinitiators. These synthetic strategies are not limited to ATRP, but are generally applicable in other controlled polymerization techniques. The method provides easy access to various polymer nanomaterials that have tremendous promise in numerous specialty applications including drug delivery, coatings, cosmetics, healthcare, and lithography.

 Dr Rama Chandran, Director, Polymer Technology said that it was a great privilege to present the AkzoNobel award in North America on behalf of our employees at the symposium held in honor of  Dr. Haifeng Gao. Rama also indicated that Polymer Chemistry remains as one of the critical science platforms in AkzoNobel’s innovation ambition in addressing our customer’s needs for cost-effective and sustainable technology solutions. AkzoNobel is a global leader in decorative paints, the largest manufacturer of performance coatings and a major supplier of specialty chemicals. The Polymer Division would like to thank AkzoNobel for their continued sponsorship. The award is a joint POLY/PMSE event. The symposia was presented in the PMSE symposia this year and will be presented as a POLY award symposia in fall 2011.

TREASURERS REPORT
Mark Dadmun

 The table below outlines the summary and status of the 2010 budget with respect to the current income and expenditures through August 2010 and is compared to the end-of-year figures for 2009 and planned 2010 budget.  

 We continue to balance the budget and ensure that the expenditures are within the allocated figures agreed upon at the last 2010 Ex-Com meeting. Any questions may be directed to Mark Dadmun, POLY Division Treasurer, dad@utk.edu .

 
2010 Operating Budget Summary

      2009 Actual                                   2010 Budget                  2010 Actual to Date

Budget Delta                                              40,569                                -40,000                             60,272

Investment Balance                                  680,435                                     -                                 706,986