Dear colleagues At this summer's annual Computational Neuroscience (CNS) meeting held in Chicago, the decision was made to form a CNS organization to administer future meetings. The purpose of this e-mail is to solicit nominations for a 15 member board of directors for the organization. Overall policy for the organization will be set by the board and a 4 member executive committee. Board members will serve 5 year terms and may be re-elected. Executive officers serve an initial 2 year term, renewable annually by a simple majority vote of the board. After 5 years, a 2/3 majority will be needed to continue. The scientific program for each meeting will be set by a separate program committee. For details, the current draft of the bylaws (to be confirmed by the initial board) is available for viewing at www.nbb.cornell.edu/neurobio/linster/cns/cns.htm.
Nominations are open to all members of the computational neuroscience community (including students and postdocs). All nominations should be accompanied by a brief (1-3 paragraph) statement outlining the candidate's past affiliation with the meeting and/or vision for the future direction of the meeting. Self-nominations are accepted. Please send nominations by e-mail to Christane Linster at [EMAIL PROTECTED] by November 15th, 2002. After receiving a complete list of nominees, board members will be elected by the current program committee (held over from the previous meeting structure) and the executive committee. The initial term of service for elected board members will be set at 1-5 years by lottery. This will ensure that in the future roughly equal numbers of board positions will open up for annual election. The main considerations for selecting board members will be diversity and continuity. It is expected that board members will have attended at least one CNS meeting in the past and will have some familiarity with the scope and tone of previous meetings. We anticipate that a number of changes will come up for discussion in the next few years, but feel that it is important to retain continuity until the new governing structure is established and working smoothly. That said, we are quite open to new ideas and obtaining new contributing voices will be an important consideration in forming a diverse board. Other forms of diversity that will be considered include: level of professional advancement (faculty, postdoc student), "home" discipline (e.g. math, biology, physics, engineering), level of analysis (e.g. cellular, network, systems), geographic location, and gender. Finally, we encourage any and all opinions regarding the future direction of the CNS meeting and the role that it should play in the field of computational neuroscience. Now is a particularly important time to voice your opinion since the direction of the meeting over the next 5-10 years will likely be formed within the next several years ([EMAIL PROTECTED]). We hope to keep CNS as a lively inclusive meeting while striving for continued improvement in scientific quality. Sincerely, The CNS executive committee: Christiane Linster - President Todd Troyer - Vice President Erik De Schutter - Secretary Linda Larson-Prior - Treasurer ------ Want to receive more news about the Computational Neuroscience Meeting and Organization? Subscribe to the CNS mailing list: Send an e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with as first line of your message the words "subscribe CNS", optionally followed by your email address if it is different from that in the message header.
