Executive Committee Meeting

                            Monday, January 9, 2012

 The meeting was held at the home of Natalie McClure in Portola Valley. It was called to order at 7:30 p.m. by Chair Natalie McClure.
 Members present: Lois Durham, Natalie McClure, Jeanette Medina, David Parker, Peter Rusch, Ean Warren, and Karl Marhenke.
 Italicized names indicate voting members; a quorum was NOT present.
 The approval of the minutes of the meeting of December 5, 2011 will be done at a later meeting, when a quorum is present.

 I. Karl Marhenke (Secretary) summarized the tasks we all face in completing the annual report by the deadline, which is Wednesday, February 15, 2012. The list of individual tasks has been e-mailed to all ExComm members.

 II. Ihab Darwish (Treasurer) was absent, but he sent the usual financial reports, which will be included with the hard copy of these minutes.
 He also sent remarks:
 Our income in 2011 was about $2000 higher than we expected, and our expenses so far have been more than $3000 lower than budgeted. By the time the outstanding expenses from late 2011 are paid, we should have a budget surplus for 2011 of about $3000.
 There have been a few changes in the 2012 budget as approved at the December ExComm meeting. Our allotment from National will be 41% higher than it was in 2011. Our donations and grants now include the funding from Gilead Sciences for the Teachers Workshop, and from Bryan Balazs for the BUBBLE Grant.
 Also, Ihab has added the Teachers Workshop as a separate expense category.

 III. Natalie McClure (Chair) briefly discussed her goals for 2012 that will be put in the annual report.
 UC Davis will stage a mentoring workshop. This will do much of what our past job-interview training workshops have done. Mentors who will instruct job applicants need to be trained. Future workshops should address interviewing for scholarships and for transferring to 4-year schools from Community Colleges, as well as for jobs.
 Peter has indicated that he will be unable to serve as Chair Elect. He has written a formal letter of resignation. Acceptance of the letter, and appointing a replacement Chair Elect will be addressed at the February ExComm meeting.
 The revitalized Program Committee consists of George Lechner, Abby Kennedy, Bonnie Charpentier, Sally Peters and Natalie. The committee will identify speakers and suggest locations for Section meetings. A chair has yet to be selected.
 The January dinner meeting will feature presentation of the Mosher Award; the winner is William Carroll, former ACS President.
 In February the speaker will be Ripudaman Malhotra, and the topic will be "A Cubic Mile of Oil." The meeting will probably be at the Biltmore.
 In March, Peter Rusch will discuss the problem of defining the kilogram, the last fundamental unit of measure still defined in terms of an artifact. The venue is still to be determined, it will probably be somewhere other than the Biltmore.
 For the May talk, George suggested the Clean Ocean Project. A Santa Cruz group has developed an ocean-going vessel that can clean up debris from ocean. For April, Natalie suggested a follow-up to the March National Meeting in San Diego: a "local SciMix", modeled after the SciMix session held at each National meeting. These are evening poster sessions geared towards student poster presentations. We plan to invite those presenters from the March national meeting, who are members of our Section to present their posters again for our Section members who didn't attend the national meeting. This local SciMix would be our April dinner meeting. It would be a suitable event to be expanded into a joint meeting with the CalACS Section; and a suitable venue would have to be found.
 Several other tentative ideas were suggested.
 The deadline for Innovative Program Grant applications is Tuesday, January 31. Two proposals have been received. First, one to support the symposium idea mentioned above, and second, a proposal from Bonnie for a program for underserved students.
 Lois asked about reimbursement for her expenses for materials for furnishing photos of section events to us for use on the website, the newsletter, and the annual report. The sense of the group was to allow the reimbursement, since the photos are valuable to us, and Lois has been providing the blank CD's, photo paper, and manilla envelopes out of her own pocket.
 There was discussion about locations for future ExComm meetings, since Sally's coming retirement from PARC this summer will mean that the meeting room there will no longer be available to us.

 It was MSC to adjourn at 9:15 p.m.

 The next meeting will be on Monday, February 6, 2012 at 7:30 p.m. at PARC. Those needing directions and/or a map should contact 

                      Respectfully Submitted,
                      Karl Marhenke, Secretary
Return to home page