The 14th ISCE annual meeting will be held July 12-16, 1997 at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. The four enclosures provide all the information you need to make your housing arrangements and register. If you misplace them, the same information is available on our website http://www.cas.usf.edu/ISCE/.
Abstracts are due by April 30, 1997 and should be sent to Dr. Murray Isman. Please follow the instructions carefully. The organizers prefer that you submit your abstract via e-mail or on diskette. Registration forms are also due on April 30, 1997. Send them to the Secretariat ISCE 97, UBC Conference Center, not to Dr. Isman. You can also register electronically if you wish. Website to do this is: http://www.conferences.ubc.ca/chemecol_reg.htm Payment must accompany the form. Accommodations can be made up until June 12, 1997. Send the form to the Reservations Office, UBC Conference Center. You can reserve your room with a credit card number. Prices are quoted in Canadian funds (multiply by .75 to convert to US Dollars). Deposits are not required for single rooms. Student Travel Awards. These are Due by March 31, 1997 and should be sent to Nancy Targett, Chair of the Awards Committee.
John Romeo has joined Jim Nation and David Jones as an Editor of the Journal of Chemical Ecology. The workload of the Journal has increased to the point that additional help was needed. The appointment occurred in January and the efforts will be felt in the May issue.
John has considerable editing experience having worked on several books in the annual series Recent Advances in Phytochemistry. Since 1994 he has served as Editor-in-Chief of the that publication. He has been a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Chemical Ecology for several years, and is also a regular reviewer for Phytochemistry and the Journal of Natural Products. His research expertise is with chemical isolation and characterization of nonprotein amino acids and alkaloids. His ecological studies have focused on plant/insect interactions and allelopathy. He was educated at Hamilton College, University of Idaho, and University of Texas. His scientific mentors were E. Arthur Bell, Karl Folkers, and B.A. Krukoff.
He is a Past-President of the Phytochemical Society of North America and has been Secretary of the International Society of Chemical Ecology for 7 years. He compiled the first membership directory of the Society in 1985, hosted the 10th Annual Meeting in Clearwater Beach, Florida in 1993, and established the Society website in 1995. Currently he is Professor and Chairman of the Department of Biology at the University of South Florida in Tampa. He is looking forward this new duty and will welcome your assistance and suggestions for improving our Journal.
The Website is getting an increasing amount of use. Among the new features: you can obtain the latest information about the 1997 meeting as it evolves; you can register for the 1997 meeting by following the appropriate link from our site to the meeting site at UBC; you can read the Prague abstracts and will be able to read the Vancouver abstracts at meeting time; you can scan the table of contents page from the Journal of Chemical Ecology; you can read the ISCE newsletter.
If you wish to link a particular site to our site, send a note to the Secretary describing the link and provide the needed information. Hopefully, the membership list will be on-line by summer.
The credit card reader is now working well after some initial problems. You can now pay dues via credit card if you wish. The mailing label on the newsletter contains information about your member status. You should have the word "life" or a year, e.g. "96", indicating the last year in which you paid dues. Please check your label carefully and respond accordingly.
I am in the process of preparing the membership list for the website. It should be ready by spring or early summer, but definitely before the Vancouver meeting.
The Society will again support the travel of students to attend the annual meeting. The formal endowment established by the EC and Councilors at Prague insures that this will continue to happen. $5000 Has been set aside for travel to the Vancouver meeting. All student members of ISCE are encouraged to apply. The applications will be evaluated by the Student Awards Committee. To be eligible you must meet the following criteria: be a paid up member of ISCE; be a full time graduate student enrolled during the calendar year of the meeting or a full-time postdoctoral research associate; present a paper or poster at the Vancouver meeting; must not have previously received an ISCE travel grant; have the endorsement of your major professor.
Applications (enclosed) should be sent airmail and postmarked before March 31, 1997 to:
Dr. Robert Mason / Department of Zoology / Oregon State University / Corvallis / OR 97331-2914 / USA.
Alternatively, you can e-mail them to: masonr@bcc.orst.edu or Fax them: 541-737-0501. DEADLINE is ABSOLUTE!
The $10,000 award of the Jean-Marie Delwart Foundation in Chemical Communication was given to Jeremy McNeil, Laval University, Quebec, Canada and to Ashok K. Raina, USDA, Beltsville, Maryland, USA for their innovative research on communication by sex pheromones in Lepidoptera.
In the context of the Delwart Foundation's aims, a 50,000 BEF Belgacom Award on communication was given also to Marcel Dicke, Wageningen Agricultural University, The Netherlands and to Ted Turlings, Institute of Plant Science/Entomology, Zurich, Switzerland for their contributions to communication between trophic levels.
These awards were presented during a ceremony held at the Belgium Academy of Science in Brussels, on December 21, 1996. Pictured below from left to right are: Prof. G. Thynes (President of the Jean-Marie Delwart Foundation), Raina, Turlings, J.M Delwart, Dicke, and McNeil.
The 1997 Silver Medal Award will be presented to William Fenical of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography and the University of San Diego at the 14th Annual Meeting in Vancouver. Dr. Fenical is a pioneer in marine natural products research. He currently serves as, Director of the Center for Marine Biotechnology and Biomedicine at Scripps. He is also coordinator of the University of California Sea Grant College Program.
Dr. Fenical's research is funded by the National Science Foundation. He collaborates with scientists around the world. A few representative titles of recent papers are: Aculitols, potent herbivore feeding deterrents from the tropical brown alga Dictyota acutiloba; Volutamides A-E, halogenated alkaloids with antifeedant properties from the Atlantic Bryozoan Amanthia convoluta; Isolation of microbial antibiotics from a marine Ascidian of the genus Didemnum; Synergisims in plant defenses against herbivores interactions of chemical defenses, structural defenses and plant quality; Defenses of Caribbean sponges against predatory fish: Chemical deterrency.
He has received a number of awards and honors including the Paul J. Scheuer Award in Marine Natural Products Chemistry (1996) and the Outstanding Alumni Award, University of California-Riverside (1994). He serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Natural Products, Molecular Marine Biology and Biotechnology, and Journal of Marine Biotechnology. He served as President of the ISCE in 1993. In his Special Lecture at Vancouver, Dr. Fenical will present a short history of marine chemical ecology.
Advances in Trematode Biology edited by B. Fried and T.K. Graczyk becomes available in May, 1997. The book has chapters on: Modes of transmission and control; Excystation and cultivation; Reproductive Physiology and Behavior; Physiology and biochemistry of larval Trematode-snail relations; host-recognition by Trematode Miracidia and Cercariac; Specificity and Immunobiology of larval Digenean-Snail associations; Proteases; Neurobiology; and Molecular biology. The book costs $69.95 and is available from CRC Press, Inc., Boca Raton, FL, USA.
