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GOVERNMENT AND SOCIETY
Analytical chemists are in for a two-forone deal next year: The American Chemical Society (ACS) Division of Analytical Chemistry (DAC) will host several symposia at Pittcon 2007. “Since Pittcon is the big meeting for analytical chemists, we’ve wanted to have a real presence there and be able to go where the majority of our membership goes,” says DAC chair-elect (2005–2006) Laurie Locascio of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The partnership between the 2 groups will be a 1-year trial. Teaming up with Pittcon isn’t a novel idea for DAC, which, with 10,810 members, is one of the largest ACS divisions. According to DAC chair (2005– 2006) Chris Enke at the University of New Mexico, the division’s executive committee has been mulling over the idea for a decade. Pittcon, which is typically held 2–3 weeks before the ACS spring national meeting, is the main annual event for analytical chemists. The DAC executive committee has felt that its members would be better served if DAC hosted sessions at Pittcon instead of the ACS spring national meeting. In 2007, the 2 meetings will be held ~3 weeks apart (Feb. 25–March 2 and March 25–29, respectively) in the same city, Chicago, so the DAC executive committee has decided it’s time to give the idea a shot. DAC and Pittcon see it as a win–win situation. Locascio and Enke point out that, under the particular circumstances, sponsoring sessions at Pittcon will be significantly less expensive for DAC than running a full program at the ACS meeting. Because the two conferences won’t compete for the same speakers at essentially the same time, the savings from the Pittcon partnership will be used to “greatly strengthen the diversity and quality” of DAC’s fall program, Enke says. In addition, DAC can now offer other advantages, such as more travel support. “We believe we’ll be able to very substantially improve the [fall] meeting both in quality and attendance,
in significant part because we’ll have more resources,” he says. Pittcon 2007 program chair Melinda Stephens at Geneva College points out that for Pittcon, “The ACS has a strength that we lack, and that is their undergraduate program. What I see as a benefit to us is to reach out [to] those undergraduate students a bit more than Pittcon has been able to in the past.” John C. Katz, the director for the Scientific & Professional Advancement Group of the ACS Membership Division, says, “I’m sure some within the ACS will view this development with concern. But the DAC leadership believes it can attract and retain more members by delivering the DAC program at Pittcon rather than the ACS spring national meeting. They want to conduct an experiment to find out. I can’t argue with that approach, nor do I find it odd that chemists—of all people—would want to run an experiment to validate a hypothesis.” DAC plans to host four invited symposia, four contributed sessions, and an undergraduate poster session at Pittcon. Abstracts will be solicited for the contributed and poster sessions. “The abstracts will be submitted through the Pittcon website, using the Pittcon abstract submission process, but they will go into [a special] ACS section so the ACS committee can decide which ones they want to include and which ones they don’t,” explains Stephens. The executive committee members of DAC will “develop their own sessions. . . . Pittcon won’t interfere with that process,” she adds.
PHOTODISC
ACS Division of Analytical Chemistry teams up with Pittcon
DAC’s absence from the ACS spring national meeting may have a couple of downsides. “We know analytical sessions are attended primarily by DAC members, but they are not solely populated by DAC members. Non-DAC registrants, who may have looked forward to presenting at, or sitting in on, analytical sessions as part of their national meeting experience in Chicago next year, won’t have that opportunity,” says Katz. And the DAC award winners will have to do double duty. In the past, DAC award winners participated in symposia honoring their work and a banquet for award winners at the ACS spring national meeting. This time, the award winners will travel (with DAC support) to both the ACS spring and fall national meetings. “We talked to several past awardees to find out if this would be a problem, and we haven’t had any negative feedback,” says Locascio. “All have indicated that they would be happy to go the awards dinner [in the spring] and still come to the programming in the fall.” a —Rajendrani Mukhopadhyay J U LY 1 , 2 0 0 6 / A N A LY T I C A L C H E M I S T R Y
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