Sorry for the off-topic post: Dear Colleagues,
It is a remarkable time for Cryo-EM! Given a very successful Cryo-EM Symposium at the Annual Meeting of the Biophysical Society in Baltimore last month, the idea arose to create an official Cryo-EM Subgroup of the Biophysical Society. There would be many advantages to having such an official subgroup, the principal one being that we would be able to organize a Subgroup Scientific Meeting every year on Saturday at the Annual Meeting of the Society. Since > 6,000 people attend these annual meetings (including quite a few cryo-EM people) the scientific session on Saturday would be a wonderful forum for presenting new results in methods, techniques and applications to biological problems. We envision a session that could be held perhaps 7:30 - 10:00 pm, which would not conflict with other subgroup meetings, and would allow for five-seven talks that might be selected from submitted abstracts or from nominations. There would be many people outside of the cryo-EM community who would be interested in such talks, and these might be in addition to the cryo-EM talks that are given within the regular Platform Sessions and Symposia. The Subgroup would also be able to help nominate Cryo-EM people for Society awards, as well as help to increase the visibility of cryo-EM within the Society, since many cryo-EM people have been associated with the Society for many years. There are also wonderful opportunities for cryo-EM people to interact with people using techniques ranging from molecular dynamics to fluorescence. So we see many benefits to having such a subgroup, and no downside. To form this subgroup, we need 100 signatures from current (2015) Regular, Emeritus or Early Career members of the Society (unfortunately student members are not counted). To sign this petition, simply send an email to subgro...@biophysics.org<mailto:subgro...@biophysics.org> indicating your support. We have created a link that will allow you to see the proposed bylaws of the subgroup: http://www.biophysics.org/CryoEM If you are a member of the Society, please sign the petition! If you are not a member, please join so that you may then sign the petition! Regards, Bridget Carragher Yifan Cheng Edward Egelman (President of the Biophysical Society) Irina Serysheva David Stokes Da-Neng Wang
