Some items for the New Year

With the new year soon upon us, I thought I would telegraph some of the significant events for the next semester. I'll be off to the the SICB meeting in Phoenix in the first week of January to chair the editorial board meeting for The Biological Bulletin. I'll try to take some pictures from the road and post them (although I suspect my digital images from trips to Austria and China later in the year will be more interesting). Then on January 11 and 12, the Institute will hold its annual scientific retreat, this year organized by Professor Layne Kalbfleisch. I've written about the retreat before–it's a chance for all of us to get together to talk about our scientific research off-site. In future years, we'll be moving the retreat to the end of the Spring semester, to allow us to coordinate overlap with the Institute's two advisory boards.

Also during January we'll be interviewing candidates for the various PI searches that are on-going. I'm looking forward to meeting with the finalists. These interviews will continue into February. The anticipation is that there will be three new PI's joining the Institute at the beginning of next academic year.

Later in the Spring, we'll be hosting the Decade of the Mind Symposium. The keynote speaker list looks spectacular. More about that later.

Jim