President's Report

29th August 2008

A key achievement this year has been the commissioning of the well known artists, Michael Meszaros to make the three medals for our society:

(1) The ANZSMS Medal;
(2) The Morrison Medal;
(3) The Bowie Medal.

The Executive approved the designs of all three medals and the models have been completed by Michael Meszaros. The Morison and Bowie medals required modeling from real life, as shown in Figure 1 for the Morrison medal. The plasters of all three medals have been sent to the diesinker. Progress on all the dies is good and the medals should be struck in time for the first awards to be given at ANZSMS 22 next year.

The Executive committee approved presenting both Professor Morrison and Bowie with large cast plaques of the design for the medals. Professor Bowie was presented with his on the occasion of his 70th birthday (see Figure 2), while Professor Morrison will be presented with his at ANZSMS 22 next year.

As required by the guidelines, the following Committee was formed to judge the award of the ANZSMS and Bowie Medals:
Graham Cooks, Scott McLuckey, Peter Armentrout, Simon Gaskell, Carol Robinson, Samantha Nelis, Michael Guilhaus and Richard O'Hair.

I am pleased to announce that Professor Jim Morrison is the winner of the ANZSMS Medal and Dr Stephen Blanksby is the winner of the Bowie Medal. I want to thank all the people who nominated candidates and the committee members for assessing the applications.

I was contacted by Professor Grotemeyer regarding potential plenary and keynote speakers. With input from the Executive, the following nominations were forwarded:

Plenary Lecturer:

1. Professor Murray McEwan who has been one of the pioneers in SIFT mass spectrometry, including both fundamental (interstellar and planetary atmospheres) and analytical applications.

1. Associate Professor Evan Bieske (University of Melbourne), who has built 2 different types of instruments: a triple quad + laser instrument to study the IR spectra of ions and more recently a trapping instrument to study megadalton charged particles. The latter instrument is quite exciting as it is pushing the limits of MS.
2. Dr Stephen Blanksby (Wollongong University), who has carrying out fundamental research on reactive oxygen species and has developed exciting new ozone techniques for lipidomics. Stephen has recently won the prestigious Rennie medal of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute.
3. Associate Professor Kevin Downard (University of Sydney), who has made important contributions to the application of mass spectrometry to study aspects of the immune response and pathogens that stimulate it.