I hope everyone has had an enjoyable and fruitful summer. It’s been a busy one for the BSC, with planning for the Annual Meeting, pushing the website project to completion, and dealing with physical and personnel changes in the Assay Laboratory. Here are some of the highlights.
Annual Meeting
Our forty fourth annual meeting, on October 31 in Atlanta, is only seven weeks away, and the Planning Committee is working hard to ensure that it will be productive and successful. The program is by and large finalized, and registration is now open. If you are planning to register and submit an abstract, please do so now – the deadline for registration is October 1. It is critically important that we receive poster submissions by that time, since the planning committee needs to review them and select the two submitters who will be invited to give oral presentations. In addition, we need to have an idea of how many posters will be presented so that we can best plan the exhibit space.
Website Redesign
We’re almost there! Chad Fagan and I had a conversation with Chris Markham and Jordan Carpenter of Mason Digital earlier this week, and once a few last details of the new electronic system for submitting stains for certification are worked out, we will be ready to go live. That should certainly happen by the end of September, and everyone will get to enjoy the look and feel of the new site.
Laboratory
The relocation of the Assay Laboratory from its current home in the basement of the University of Rochester Medical Center to space on the first floor, is waiting on a few remaining renovations to the new site, and in the meantime, Chad Fagan is doing everything he can to coordinate the move while also staying on top of his usual full schedule of certification work. He deserves our heartfelt thanks for the herculean efforts he has put into this project over the past few months.
Dr. David Hicks, who has been the Assay Laboratory Supervisor for the past 18 years, has found it necessary to leave the position. Dr. Brian FInkleman has agreed to assume it, and we are confident that the transition will be a smooth one. Dr. Hicks has ably filled the position for 18 years, for which we thank him gratefully, and we wish him success in his new endeavors. Dr. Finkleman, elected to the Board of Trustees last year, has been a superb addition to the BSC. In addition to being a trustee, he is also on the editorial staff of Biotechnic and Histochemistry, where he is the statistical consultant assisting in the review of submitted manuscripts. We welcome him to his new position with the Assay Laboratory.
Over the past year, the editorial board has been working with people at Taylor and Francis to catch up on backlogged manuscripts and adhere to our target publication schedule. Dr. Bradley Turner, editor in chief, will present a full report on the journal’s status at the Annual Meeting. Remember – access to B&H is one of the valuable benefits of membership in the BSC.
