President's Report



4th February 1997


Since my last report, which was tabled at the AGM held in Sydney on 12 June 1996 and is on the Web, the Central Committee has met once, on 9 December 1996. A number of items discussed at that meeting are on the Agenda for the General Meeting so I will not elaborate on those in this Report. Following the successful lecture tour by Professor Graham Cooks in June 1996 as the invited ANZSMS Lecturer, I produced a report for the Committee with guidelines for future ANZSMS Lecturers, which was adopted. The Committee has agreed that we should continue the practice of inviting a prominent overseas scientist to undertake a lecture tour of Australasia between ANZSMS Conferences, if a suitable person is available. I invite members to make suggestions to any member of the Committee for the next ANZSMS Lecturer, who would be expected to visit during the first half of 1998.

There has been one change in the Committee since the last AGM. The Treasurer, Ray Lidgard, handed in his resignation at the December 9 meeting and Karina Watkins was elected by the Committee as the new Treasurer. Karina works in Canberra with the Australian Geological Survey Organisation and we welcome her to the Committee. Once again, I would like to thank Ray for his valuable contributions to the setting-up and functioning of the Central Committee since its inception.

Because this is a General Meeting and not the Annual General Meeting (which will be held after the end of our financial year on March 31), the annual election of members of the Central Committee will not take place until then. I do intend, however, to call for nominations for all of the Committee positions so that these can be tabled at the AGM.

The Committee agreed to support the nomination of Professor Jim Morrison for the Thomson Medal and Associate Professor Michael Guilhaus for the Brunnée Award, both of which will be presented at the 14th International Mass Spectrometry Conference (IMSC) in Tampere, Finland in August this year. We also discussed making a bid at Tampere to host the 16th IMSC in Sydney in 2003 and this is still under consideration.

Through the efforts of Michael Guilhaus, a number of the papers presented at ANZSMS15 in Sydney were published in a special issue of Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry. The Committee decided not to pursue this approach for the present Conference but are proposing that, for future Conferences, we should investigate the cost of publishing our own Conference Proceedings as two-page extended abstracts along the same lines as that done by the ASMS. We welcome discussion from members on this proposal.

John Traeger continues to do an excellent job of maintaining and expanding the ANZSMS WWW site. The Committee would like to hear any suggestions that members have for ways of using the Web site for other mass spectrometry-related purposes.


John MacLeod

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