Report on some meetings in Bergen before AE’s Annual Conference#
H. MaurerSeptember 2012
As usual, there were a number of meetings preceding the annual conference: two board meetings, a meeting of the three nomination subcommittees (for sections A: Humanities, B: Natural Sciences; and C: Medicine and Biology. Then there was a meeting of all nomination subcommittees, a council meeting (one of its role is to finally approve the results of the nomination committees).
All these meetings were open only to members directly involved in one of the committees. The nomination meetings were chaired by Ole Peterson, the Council by president Lars Walloe. Then there was also a general meeting open to all members of Academia Europaea. I will only mention a few highlights and you will also find a few pictures below: the first ones are from the nomination subcommittee for Natural Sciences, then there are a few from the general nomination committee, from the council meeting and the general assembly meeting. Please find separate: Reports on the opening meeting; the scientific part of the conference; Bergen and social events.
This year we had 373 nominations: this is a fraction of all new members proposed, since section committees did already their pre-selection and submitted only the very best candidates. (To give an example: we had 52 members proposed in Informatics, but the section committee looked only at the 30 best. Of those, 27 were accepted by the various nomination committees.) So, of 373 nominations, in the end 326 were approved in the three step process: nominations subcommittee, full nominations committee, council. If this number sounds high, please do consider that unfortunately we also lose 100 + active members a year due to illness or death.
Also, we will have about 2.700 members end of 2012. The aim is to eventually have about 5.000 members, since 20 section in some 30 countries would then amount to an average of about 8 members per section per countries, the distribution of course also depending on section and (size of) country. To reach 5.000 members within the next 10 years or so we would need 300- 400 new members every year. However, note that those are numbers: what is really wanted is to get all best researchers in all European countries. This includes by our current rules Russia and the former European parts of the Soviet Union, and also Turkey and Israel. Note that we do have also foreign members, but foreign members must be very, very excellent (otherwise we would get more foreign members than European ones!). Thus, no foreign members that are not extremely outstanding should be nominated. Very good is not enough for foreign members!
In the council among the points of general interest let me just mention three:
(1) The president (Andre Mischke) of the YAE (the Young Academy of Europe) presented that endeavour. It was started by young ERC grant holders getting together and forming an association to have a common voice. They are affiliated with AE, but have their own identity, see http://www.yacadeuro.org
. AE and YAE will cooperated closely and will send representatives to their respective council meetings.
(2) Next year’s conference in Wroclaw will be the 25th anniversary of AE and hence a particular interesting meeting. So note the dates Sept. 14-17, Wroclaw, Poland, right now! It will be the first AE meeting where some 400 participants are expected, and where there will be both plenary sections and parallel sections, all supposed to be at a level to be understandable by an educated but not necessarily specialized audience. You find more information on this and the beauties of Wroclaw on this server here.
(3) The writer of this report was elected as member of the board by the Council for a term of 3 years as of Jan. 1, 2013. His emphasis is to be PR. So in addition to bugging you to support www.ae-info.org with interesting information you can expect some other activities in which I hope you will help me. The very first is that you can get stickers like the one shown as last picture below free by sending an email to "Katarzyna Majkowska" majkowska@acadeuro.wroclaw.pl or to office@ae-info.org with your mailing address and the number of stickers you want. Put those stickers on your office door, your luggage, your car, whatever! If you have interesting ideas how to promote AE, please do let me know!
In the general assembly that took place in the main lecture hall of the student building (see picture) the main items also were YAE, the Wroclaw meeting and some very important nominations: Anne Buttimer was elected as second vice-president (so we now have two: one, Sierd Cloetingh, representing the Natural and Biological Sciences and Ann Buttimer representing the Humanities). Ole Petersen was re-elected as chair of nominations, Theo D’Haen as Editor of the ”European Review” and Sir Roger Elliott as honorary treasurer. Note that Cinzia Ferrini’s and Michel Che’s term are ending in 2013, so we will lose those very valuable persons in the board. (Maybe it is time to re-think our by-laws in this matter.)
What follows is a small collection of pictures. It is high time that those pictures are not taken by me in passing but by a professional photographer who makes sure to capture all relevant moments! If any one of you have further fotos, or can help with some names I don’t remember: please send those infos to me at hmaurer@iicm.edu. Thanks!
