Young scientists sig Report 2006

YSSIG Social Events

1) YSSIG Mixer: This year's mixer was held on the Diamond Head Lawn at the conference hotel. Qiagen contributed $1500 to the event. Attendance was not as high as ticket requests had suggested (we were in competition with the Bruker Luau), however everyone seemed to have a great time and the timing and food/drink balance seemed to work very well. People liked the outdoor location and the music.

2) Mentor/Mentee dinner: This was held at the Pacific beach Hotel. The cocktail hour worked very well and there was a good balance of Mentees and Mentors at each table. Feedback was good.

YSSIG sponsored sessions

1) Topics of Interest to the Young Scientist: This year's session was chaired by Peter Horanyi, went very well and was extremely well attended.

2) Etter Award Session (co-sponsored with GIG): The session was co-chaired by Arwen Pearson and Anna Gardberg (YSSIG Chair), who was unable to attend the meeting. All the speakers gave excellent talks.

YSSIG Business meeting

1) Cater the next careers session towards graduate students more and address how to get a postdoc.

2) Maybe facilitate this with a panel lunch that has postdocs and young faculty that can answer questions of the graduate students

3) Judy Flippen Anderson Suggested that since funding is so scarce in the recent past in crystallography, maybe bring in representatives from NIH and others to talk about what the funding agency expects

4) Move the mixer so it doesn't overlap with one of the big vendor parties (probably to the same night as the Rigaku Fun-run as that is earlier in the evening).

5) The sessions that we would like to sponsor at ACA 2007 are:

Fun Lectures for the Young Scietists (FLYS), Chairs: Robert Huether and Bret Dillard
Etter Award (Co-sponsor with General Interest SIG) Chair: Peter Horanyi
Advances in Data collection (Co-Sponsor with Synchrotron radiation SIG)(Chairs from Synchrotron SIG)

6) We took nominations for the next SIG elections: