BIOPHYSICAL SOCIETY NEWSLETTER
2
AUGUST
2014
BIOPHYSICAL SOCIETY
Officers
President
Dorothy Beckett
President-Elect
Edward Egelman
Past-President
Francisco Bezanilla
Secretary
Lukas Tamm
Treasurer
Paul Axelsen
Council
Olga Boudker
Taekjip Ha
Samantha Harris
Kalina Hristova
Juliette Lecomte
Amy Lee
Marcia Levitus
Merritt Maduke
Daniel Minor, Jr.
Jeanne Nerbonne
Antoine van Oijen
Joseph D. Puglisi
Michael Pusch
Bonnie Wallace
David Yue
Biophysical Journal
Leslie Loew
Editor-in-Chief
Society Office
Ro Kampman
Executive Officer
Newsletter
Ray Wolfe
Production
Laura Phelan
Profile
Ellen Weiss
Public Affairs
The
Biophysical Society Newsletter
(ISSN 0006-3495) is published
twelve times per year, January-
December, by the Biophysical
Society, 11400 Rockville Pike, Suite
800, Rockville, Maryland 20852.
Distributed to USA members
and other countries at no cost.
Canadian GST No. 898477062.
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to Biophysical Society, 11400
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All rights reserved.
Message from the President
It is time to make preparations for attending the 2015 Biophysical Society Annual
Meeting! The call for papers, which includes the symposia and workshop titles and
speakers, was recently mailed to all Society members. The Meeting, which will be held
in Baltimore, Maryland, February 7-11, 2015, again features a program full of exciting
science.
Meeting co-chairs
Enrique de la Cruz
and
Karen Fleming
, along with their committee
members, have been working since October 2013 to develop a program that not only addresses the breadth of
areas represented by Society members, but also incorporates new and emerging areas in biophysics. Devel-
oping such a program for a field as multidisciplinary and rapidly changing as biophysics is a daunting task.
A glance through the abstract topic categories, which are updated annually, illustrates the rapid progress of
biophysics.
The breadth and diversity of the Annual Meeting reflects the active participation of many Society members
in the program development. From the call for topics that goes out each year to our 9,000 members, to the
selection of over 500 speakers for platform sessions from among the submitted abstracts, to the independently
designed subgroup programs, the Annual Meeting program is developed by and consists of working biophysi-
cists representing a rich diversity of demographics, perspectives, techniques, and research areas.
The symposia and workshop topics illustrate the breadth of both the meeting and the discipline of biophysics.
• The National Lecture by
Klaus Schulten
will reveal the contributions of computation to seminal discover-
ies in biophysics.
• In keeping with 2015 designated by UNESCO as the Year of Light symposia, including
Bacterial Subcel-
lular Dynamics at Super Resolution, Membrane Trafficking
, and
Advances in Electron Microscopy,
illustrate
the central role of biophysicists in exploiting light to reveal fundamental features of biological structure
and function.
• The engagement of biophysics in the emerging areas of systems and bioengineering research is evidenced
in
Emergent Properties and Collective Behaviors of Complex System
and
Artificial Cells: Understanding and
Engineering
.
• Attend the
Systems Biology Approaches to Neuroscience
to better appreciate the contributions that biophys-
ics can make to the Brain Initiative.
• The
Cardiomyopathies and Contractile Proteins
symposium provides an opportunity to learn about the
basic research performed by the Society membership that is directed toward elucidating molecular
mechanisms of disease.
As biophysicists, we know that attendance at the Annual Meeting is crucial to remaining professionally cur-
rent. As PIs, we know the role the Meeting has played in our own development and its importance to the
students and postdocs in our labs. Many of us joined the Biophysical Society in order to present our first
posters or platform talks. Many of us work in departments in which there are no other biophysicists. For us,
each Meeting is like a homecoming where we reunite with and learn from old connections and friends and
where we develop new collaborations.
Included in this newsletter is a poster with the scientific program for you to post and distribute. Spread the
word about the benefits of attending the Biophysical Society Annual Meeting with others. I look forward to
seeing you in Baltimore!
–Dorothy Beckett
, President
