Thank you Jason and greetings to my fellow DPS members. It is both a pleasure and an honor to serve as DPS chair for the coming year.
I want to thank Jason Barnes, Bonnie Buratti and the DPS committee for their volunteered time and commitment to the division. We welcome Cathy Olkin as Vice-Chair and Britney Schmidt and Catherine Neish as new Committee members. A special thanks to Bonnie Buratti for her just completed, 3- years’ service to our community.
I agreed to run for this position after researching the chair’s responsibilities, assessing my available time, consulting previous division chairs, and reflecting on my motives to serve. I can manage the responsibilities, have time to lead, as the Dawn mission, for which I’m a co-investigator, is in its last, extended-mission year. And my motivation for taking on this responsibility is to serve the DPS community because you are my academic family. I have grown personally and professionally with many of you for my entire career as a planetary scientist. I joined DPS as a graduate student in 1974, and have made career-long friends and colleagues. We’ve generated ideas for investigations, written proposals and then papers together, weathered proposal rejections and funding cuts, then celebrated the triumphs of successful NASA missions and participated in the transformation of knowledge that is now part of our world and civilization. When I come to meetings today, I see old friends and I continue to meet interesting, extremely intelligent, talented members who are carrying forward our charge to explore the solar system and other planetary systems and you want to make a difference in our world today.
In the coming year, the DPS committee and I will assess the community’s relationship with our publishers who make our scientific results available and I want to be sure they are accessible to everyone.
I will reinforce our professional community’s values treating each other with respect and care. Next year, we’ll host our annual meeting in Provo, UT and with AAS meeting organizers’ we are committed to hosting a meeting that is welcoming and safe for everyone. I ask you to embrace those values (respect and care) and to present and discuss your research, be open to critique of your results so that they are robust, critically reviewed, clearly presented and archived.
Our standing committees from who you’ve just heard will continue in the coming year with reviewed and renewed charges from the Committee.
Please encourage your colleagues and students to join the AAS and the DPS and enjoy the opportunities for professional growth that our division provides.
With that I want to open the meeting to questions.
Lucy McFadden
Pasadena, CA
October 19, 2016