Summary of San Francisco Meeting of Board of Director’s Meeting, June 2009

As one of my final tasks, I would like to pro­vide some high­lights from actions of your Board of Direc­tors at their annu­al meet­ing in San Fran­cis­co. The four new Direc­tors-at-Large were seat­ed (B. Gates, S. Soled, Bob Davis, and Jing­guang Chen). The Board dis­cussed the ques­tion of cre­at­ing stu­dent chap­ters in addi­tion to local clubs. The Board encour­ages under­grad­u­ate stu­dents to get involved with the local catal­y­sis club by con­tact­ing any one of the offi­cers or club rep­re­sen­ta­tive list­ed on the NACS web­site (www.nacatsoc.org).

  • Pri­or to our elec­tions of offi­cers, we cre­at­ed a new offi­cer role, that of Lead Trustee, who is in charge of guid­ing the invest­ments of the Soci­ety. Fur­ther, in this time of rapid and elec­tron­ic com­mu­ni­ca­tions, most felt that the posi­tion of For­eign Sec­re­tary in addi­tion to Sec­re­tary was super­flu­ous, so we vot­ed to elim­i­nate the office of For­eign Sec­re­tary and dis­trib­ute the work among oth­er offi­cers. In this regard, I want to espe­cial­ly thank W. Curt Con­ner for his many years of valu­able ser­vice to the Soci­ety in the role of For­eign Secretary. 
  • The Board also agreed to direct our offi­cers to con­trol expens­es to assure that they don’t exceed our income. There was a unan­i­mous feel­ing that in sup­port­ing a num­ber of edu­ca­tion­al mis­sions, we, as a Soci­ety, should not spend more mon­ey than we can earn from invest­ments and mem­ber­ship fees. 
  • The new NACS offi­cers for 2009–2013 are Pres­i­dent, Enrique Igle­sia, Vice Pres­i­dent, Bruce Cook, Trea­sur­er, CY Chen, Sec­re­tary, H‑X Li, Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Direc­tor, Edrick Morales, and John Byrne, Lead Trustee.
  • The Board agreed to make it stan­dard pol­i­cy in future meet­ings (as has been the case for the last 2 NAM meet­ings) that record­ing meet­ing events through audio­vi­su­al or pho­to­graph­ic meth­ods is pro­hib­it­ed at all NAM events with­out con­sent of the pre­sen­ter. Also, since dues col­lec­tion and time­ly lists of local club offi­cers is crit­i­cal to the year­ly oper­a­tion of the NACS, pay­ments of local club year­ly stu­dent awards will be con­di­tioned upon hav­ing a cur­rent mem­ber­ship list and up-to-date dues payments.
  • The meet­ing Chair (Galen Fish­er) of the 22nd NAM, oper­at­ed through the Michi­gan Catal­y­sis Soci­ety sum­ma­rized their prepa­ra­tions for the June 2011 meet­ing in Detroit, Michi­gan. The Tri-State Club rep­re­sen­ta­tive, Jür­gen Lade­beck, sum­ma­rized their ear­ly efforts in orga­niz­ing the 23rd NAM meet­ing in Louisville, Ken­tucky in June of 2013.

With the suc­cess­ful con­clu­sion of the 21st NAM in San Fran­cis­co, I want to per­son­al­ly thank the co-chairs (Enrique Igle­sia, Bruce Gates, and Char­lie Wil­son) and their orga­niz­ing com­mit­tee for their tire­less activ­i­ties and their commitment.
 
John Armor