Executive Director's Blog

(The pressure's on now. This blog has been listed by a kind soul as being among the Top 50 Biology Research Blogs. AIBS is delighted to be among such company.)

As discussed with the AIBS Council of Member Societies and Organizations last May, the AIBS Board and staff, working with outside consultants, are in the early stages of developing a new strategic plan for AIBS. This summer and fall we'll engage in surveys and focus groups with various biological organizations and individual biologists, both members and non-members, and we expect the plan to take shape next year.

While we don't expect to move away from the core AIBS activities I blogged about last March:

- The education, training, and career advancement of biologists, as well as contributing to a bio-literate public able to appreciate the benefits of using a scientific approach and methods of inquiry to understand the world around us
- Public policy representation and advocacy of the biological profession's interests to the federal government with respect to legislation, regulations, and funding decisions
- The peer review, quality assurance, and publication of scientists' scholarly articles about advances in biology
- The peer review, quality assurance, and comparative ranking of scientists' research proposals and programs in biology so as to facilitate informed decisions by the public and private agencies funding that work
- Conferences, workshops, and other gatherings of biologists, in person and online, to share information about the latest advances and issues in their fields
- Professional development activities for biologists to improve their research, teaching, and public communication skills

We do recognize the need to:

- Focus the AIBS mission within these activities on what we do best and can support; and move away from what we don't do best (no matter how well-intentioned) and can't support
- Keep AIBS relevant to the needs of biologists today - what do biologists "need," and does it mean to be a "member" (of anything) anymore?
- Develop year-to-year continuity of AIBS leadership, governance decisions, and work with AIBS staff
- Build a mix of revenue lines for overall sustainability of our programs, operations, and the AIBS organization, all with the necessary cost controls

All while playing to our hard-earned strengths:

- Credibility with biologists, policy makers, and agencies as a trusted broker and convenor, going back to our founding as a part of the National Academy of Sciences
- Customer service orientation, with a high level of responsiveness and flexibility
- Great depth and breadth of biology knowledge among AIBS staff and Board members
- A meta-level organization with a unique mandate to be active at the communication nexus among developments in different biology societies and disciplines
- Our ability to "translate" and synthesize sometimes complex and arcane concepts and research for a variety of audiences
- Our skills in facilitating and convening meetings
- Our skills in online publishing of biology content, including BioScience, ActionBioscience, databases, and websites
- The stability and corporate knowledge of the AIBS management team (the average tenure of AIBS's department heads is 11 years!)

An article that really resonates with us here, and that lays out the challenge nicely, is Steven Wiley's March 2010 article in The Scientist: To Join or Not to Join: The benefits of membership to a scientific society are decreasing every year. Lately, I'm asking: Why bother?

Key quotes (added bolding is mine):

"I almost always renew my society memberships, but I think that it is more out of a sense of tradition than need. Clearly, I am not the only scientist who is ambivalent about societies. Judging from their newsletters, many of the larger societies are struggling with stagnant or declining memberships, especially among young scientists. Although it is the youngest scientists who potentially have the most to gain from a scientific society because of networking opportunities, they are the ones who usually are most poorly served by those societies. This is because scientific societies generally cater to the status quo, not to the new and emerging elements of a field."

"If scientific societies truly want to promote their field of research and the careers of their members, then they should embrace new perspectives and approaches. If a society were helping me deal with the rapidly increasing rate of innovation and discovery in biology, then it would give me a great reason to bother remaining a member."

Indeed, the discussions at AIBS during our strategic planning -- and our coming surveys and focus groups -- include the question of what kinds of AIBS services could be truly useful to the biology community in the same manner that, e.g., the Nonprofit Technology Network is useful to any kind of nonprofit organization dealing with IT issues and challenges.

... including on Craigslist.

Not to worry. AIBS's financial health and array of programs and services is as robust as ever for a $9+M nonprofit organization. You might not know this, but we have three offices and almost 50 staff in the Washington area: our downtown DC office; our Reston VA office on the way to Dulles Airport; and our McLean VA office, in the suburbs within the Beltway; see here for contact information for AIBS offices and programs.

These days we have more space than we need in the DC office (6,300 sq ft) on a lease that runs to 2016. We are working with our broker to market the space as either a sub-let for another organization to share space with us or as a complete rental of the space to another organization, in which case the AIBS operations that are based in DC would likely relocate to our Reston VA office (10,000 sq ft) except for the AIBS Public Policy Office, which would remain located in downtown DC.

Furthermore, just as many other organizations are doing in these challenging economic times, AIBS is looking to go green and save money by increasing the number of staff positions that have a telecommuting component (part-time or full-time) so as to reduce our overall office-space needs, reduce our infrastructure costs, reduce our energy use for transportation, and give staff a break on commuting costs and hassle -- i.e. with work getting done by AIBS staff from offsite in a distributed virtual office online environment, combined with a regular schedule when everyone on a staff team meets face to face at an AIBS office location.

In fact, we already have a number of staff -- including department heads -- working offsite from locations that include Florida, rural Virginia, and California, all of whom are online with the rest of AIBS -- staff, Board, committees, members -- each day via email, chat, Skype, Google docs, Elluminate, and other online collaboration tools.

So it's only natural that we are now looking at saving costs and improving efficiencies for our office rentals and infrastructure by applying these same approaches to our operations in the Washington area -- because a penny saved on these kinds of costs is a penny that can be spent on AIBS's programmatic activities. What are AIBS's programmatic activities these days? I'm glad you asked.

Let me take a few minutes to tell you about this great organization, the American Institute of Biological Sciences, that I've been lucky enough to be a part of for 13 years. It was created more than 60 years ago as a nonprofit membership association -- a public charity -- where biologists work together to advance research and education for the good of their profession and for the improvement of human knowledge and welfare.

With offices in the Washington DC area, a Board of distinguished biologists, skilled and dedicated staff, and collaborators across the country, we run national programs in such areas as:

- One, the education of future biologists and a bio-literate public able to appreciate the benefits of using a scientific approach and methods of inquiry to understand the world around us;

- Two, public policy representation and advocacy of the biological profession's interests to the federal government with respect to legislation, regulations, and funding decisions;

- Three, the peer review, quality assurance, and publication of scientists' scholarly articles about advances in biology;

- Four, the peer review, quality assurance, and comparative ranking of scientists' research proposals and programs in biology so as to facilitate informed decisions by the public and private agencies funding that work;

- Five, conferences, workshops, and other gatherings of biologists, in person and online, to share information about the latest advances in their fields; and

- Six, professional development activities for biologists to improve their research, teaching, and public communication skills.

We fulfill our mission through a variety of face-to-face, print, and online communications, using the latest web technologies for networks, websites, webinars, and other platforms.

There is no meta-level organization in the U. S. other than AIBS that serves such a broad based role for biology, connecting individual biologists and biological organizations in collective activities with national and international colleagues.

As is the case for any nonprofit organization -- a public charity -- securing funding for AIBS's activities is always a challenge. We rely on the dedication, good will, and creativity of everyone we work with.

We do all this because AIBS recognizes that society requires reliable scientific information and an awareness of how science is done in order to make informed decisions and address important societal needs that affect us all -- and that in the absence of good science, misperceptions and outright misinformation will take its place in the public square, for the worse.

Biologists' best opportunities to advance their profession's interests, to contribute to the public discourse, and simply to do good in this world come from overcoming the traditional balkanization of biology into subdisciplinary territories, and working together towards common goals, meeting common challenges, for a common good.

It's a process, not a destination, and we press on together because the alternative of NOT trying to make a difference is not an option.

( Updated from a June 2009 posting )

At its Spring meeting on 17 May 2009, the AIBS Board of Directors passed the following resolution:

So the meeting format of two-days in the Spring in Washington DC that we've followed for the last ten years, which was itself a change from the previous format of larger multi-society meetings that we'd followed for almost 50 years has been revised beginning in 2010. Further details on past meetings, including links to their recorded online presentations, can be found at http://www.aibs.org/events/annual-meeting

We have started planning to put on, instead, a small handful of strategically timed, topic-specific, half-day events over the course of a typical year -- usually with three or four speakers -- in person in DC and online via webinar for other participants elsewhere using AIBS's new webinar platform at http://www.aibs.org/events/webinar (which has already launched with a number of webinars put on by the AIBS Education, Public Policy, and Membership and Community Programs Offices).

Future meetings, conferences, and webinars will be announced on the AIBS website's home page and meeting section. The AIBS membership will be polled for comments on this new approach at some point in 2010 / 2011.

These new meetings aim to capitalize on AIBS's unique status as a meta-level organization created to give biologists a collaborative voice and influence on the national scene. The meetings will coordinate with and build upon AIBS programs in public policy, research, education, publication in BioScience or ActionBioscience.org, and other areas of AIBS Board, staff, and member activity. They will provide networking opportunities for members with fellow scientists and decision-makers from other fields that small gatherings can do more effectively. And in each case, as much of their content as possible will be online, both as archived recordings and as real-time interactive webinars.

2010 AIBS President Joe Travis has expressed the new meeting concept nicely with the following note to his fellow AIBS Board members:

"A key component of success for [this annual program] of 1/2 day meetings is timeliness of topic. Sometimes timeliness of topic is determined by events -- a push for integrated environmental/climate research by the new administration might make a meeting on good examples of that kind of research or a meeting focused on emerging challenges of integrated research very timely.

"Sometimes timeliness might be determined by events unfolding "within science" -- a meeting focused on an emerging horizon of biology with clear implications for policy or education. This would argue that some meetings can be planned long in advance but perhaps others would be convened reasonably quickly in response to external or internal events."

AIBS attended the Sept. 17th release of the widely-anticipated NRC report, "A New Biology for the 21st Century: Ensuring the United States Leads the Coming Biology Revolution," requested by the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and U.S. Department of Energy. Its findings were presented by three members of its writing committee:

Phillip A. Sharp, Institute Professor, Koch Institute of Integrative Cancer Research, MIT
Anthony C. Janetos, Director, Joint Global Change Research Institute, University of Maryland, College Park
Keith R. Yamamoto, Executive Vice Dean, School of Medicine, University of California - San Francisco

The press release, PPTs, full report, and other information are online at http://national-academies.org/morenews/20090917.html.

The report calls for a "new multiagency, multiyear, and multidisciplinary initiative to capitalize on the extraordinary advances recently made in biology and to accelerate new breakthroughs that could solve some of society's most pressing problems -- particularly in the areas of food, environment, energy, and health."

The report is not an attempt to redefine what all of biology is or should be. We see it as a scientifically sound and strategically-savvy plan identifying four interconnected areas of biology -- (1) food supply and safety, (2) clean renewable energy from biological sources, (3) human health and disease prevention, and (4) ecosystem services -- that in synergy have the potential to attract public support and funding with practical results and education goals that improve the human condition.

Handled smartly by the scientific community to which it has now been delivered, "A New Biology for the 21st Century," has the potential to become the "Rising Above the Gathering Storm" for biology. Contact AIBS's Public Policy Director, Robert Gropp, at rgr...@aibs.org , if you can help.

AIBS has been following the NRC work on this report over the last year or so. We have received the invitation below to attend the public release of the final report on 17 Sept 2009; we plan to have representatives there. Others are invited to attend too -- just reply to acline@nas.edu (details below).

Text of Invitation:

Last December, you registered for the 2008 National Academies Biology Summit: The Role of the Life Sciences in Transforming America's Future. The Summit was held as part of a National Research Council study entitled: A New Biology for the 21st Century. I would like to invite you to attend the public briefing to mark the release of the study report.

Ann Reid
Study Director
Senior Program Officer
Board on Life Sciences
202-334-1263
areid@nas.edu

The June 2009 report (free online), "Scientific Foundations for Future Physicians," from the Association of American Medical Colleges in association with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which proposes scientific competencies for future medical school graduates and for undergraduate students who want to pursue a career in medicine, includes Competency E8: "Demonstrate an understanding of how the organizing principle of evolution by natural selection explains the diversity of life on earth".

Note also the following two paragraphs in the section titled: Issues of Concern and Goals:

"This report stems largely from the concern that premedical course requirements have been static for decades and may not accurately reflect the essential competencies every entering medical student must have mastered, today and in the future. The competencies for premedical education need to be broad and compatible with a strong liberal arts education. The work of the committee is based on the premise that the undergraduate years are not and should not be aimed only at students preparing for professional school. Instead, the undergraduate years should be devoted to creative engagement in the elements of a broad, intellectually expansive liberal arts education. Therefore, the time commitment for achieving required scientific competencies should not be so burdensome that the medical school candidate would be limited to the study of science, with little time available to pursue other academically challenging scholarly avenues that are also the foundation of intellectual growth.

"One goal of this project is to provide greater flexibility in the premedical curriculum that would permit undergraduate institutions to develop more interdisciplinary and integrative science courses, as recommended in the [2003] BIO 2010 report. By focusing on scientific competencies rather than courses, undergraduate institutions will have more freedom to develop novel courses to achieve the desired competencies without increasing the total number of instructional hours in the sciences in the face of continuing increases in medically relevant scientific knowledge. Achieving economies of time spent on science instruction would be facilitated by breaking down barriers among departments and fostering interdisciplinary approaches to science education. Indeed, the need for increased scientific rigor and its relevance to human biology is most likely to be met by more interdisciplinary courses."

I just attended a stimulating meeting here in DC with staff from the USGS's National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) program. Also present were representatives from AIBS-member-societies the Ecological Society of America (who hosted the event at their headquarters office), the Society for Conservation Biology, and the Natural Science Collections Alliance.

NBII was demonstrating its impressive new search engine for online biological data. Everyone at the meeting came away with lots of ideas for how the search engine could be used for searches that are both broad and deep and gave many suggestions for its further development to NBII, who plan to hold additional community-feedback meetings in the future.

NBII invites contacts from organizations with databases to link to (contact: mlane@usgs.gov) and describes the search engine's extensive Web 2.0 capabilities in the following press release:

"August 17, 2009. The week of August 10, the USGS National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) launched a new search engine. The new NBII search is designed to support the discovery of and provide access to critical national and global biological information and data. The new NBII search engine is based on the Vivisimo Velocity search platform and features dynamic clustering, faceted searching, extensive source control, integration with the NBII LIFE image library, and the ability to simultaneously search critical global and national biodiversity resources such as the Global Biological Information Facility (GBIF), Amphibiaweb, and the Missouri Botanical's TROPICOS database. The new NBII search supports flexible information acquisition through web site/database crawling and real time federated resource searching. Finally, the new NBII search supports the custom development of multiple information indexes, geospatial integration with Google Maps, visualization, and flexible control over search result displays. The new NBII search is available on the NBII Portal at http://www.nbii.gov/."

By all accounts, including those of AIBS Education Programs Manager Susan Musante, the big NSF-funded meeting earlier this month in DC on Transforming Undergraduate Biology Education and Mobilizing the Community for Change was highly successful and is already generating a number of exciting follow-up activities.

The Co-Chairs are:

Carol A. Brewer - Associate Dean of the Colleges Arts and Science and Professor of Biology, University of Montana (and AIBS Board member)

Alan I. Leshner - Chief Executive Officer, American Association for the Advancement of Science; Executive Publisher, Science

The project's website at www.visionandchange.org includes a growing number of resources, videos, and slides from the meeting's presentations and discussion groups.

The project's Facebook Group, run by Carol Brewer and Yolanda George, Deputy Director, AAAS Education and Human Resources Programs, already has about 100 members and welcomes anyone who is interested in improving undergraduate biology education to become a member of its virtual community and help develop an action plan for moving forward.

To quote from the Group's description:

Both the disciplines of biology and of science education have undergone a revolution. The major focus of the biological sciences - understanding life - remains unchanged, but breakthrough discoveries of the second half of the 20th century have changed the basic nature of the questions asked, while new and emerging technologies are changing the ways key questions are addressed. In undergraduate science education, new approaches and new technologies are also emerging based on evolving theories of learning. New developments in higher education have changed the manner in which people pursue higher education, and there is also a growing appreciation of the need to broaden participation within the sciences by advancing the education of all students, including those from underrepresented groups and those who will enter careers outside of science.

[Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. DUE-0923874]