The Executive Board held its annual meeting at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia on March 7 and 8. Attending were the 1992 board members: Steve Carr, Greg Grant, Paul Matsudaira (ad hoc), Ron Niece, Ray Paxton, Al Smith, and past board member Beth Fowler. Business manager Lauren Kim and president David Speicher did an excellent job of organizing this meeting for maximum productivity.
The annual meeting provides an opportunity for systematic evaluation of the current status of ABRF and allows for effective long range planning. As in past years, this year's meeting was very productive. A number of changes to organizational structure were approved and most of these are described in this newsletter. Issues that were addressed also included methods to improve coordination among committees and with the Board. The peptide synthesis/MS committee will not split as initially planned since the current arrangement is working well. In addition, mass spectrometry is rapidly becoming an integral, complementary component to other types of protein and nucleic acid analyses, and members with mass spectrometry expertise should be included on other research committees in the future.
Beth Fowler was appointed to organize a new committee to develop educational activities as described on page 3. Greg Grant will organize a compilation of chromatograms showing the elution positions for PTH derivatives of modified amino acids. Tentative plans for future scientific meetings and symposia were also discussed.
An evaluation of membership and corporate sponsors showed steady growth in both categories with the largest increase in associate members. A working budget for 1992 was finalized and a tentative three year budget was approved. Presently, the activities of the research committees are partially funded by an NSF grant which will end in early 1994. Alternative sources of partial funding for this critical area will be pursued.
It is clear that Lauren Kim has done an outstanding job as Business Manager. Having a business manager has considerably lightened the workload of the Executive Board members and has resulted in more efficient operation of the organization. Her assistance with the newsletter has been invaluable. A new editorial board was also approved (see page 1).
The Board felt that much has been accomplished since ABRF's inception and overall development of activities has been highly positive.
Beth Fowler
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