Dear members of the US HUPO scientific community:
I am writing to inform you of this year’s President transition and to thank you for giving me the honor of being the President of US HUPO for the past two years. Today we will have our annual US HUPO Board of Directors meeting (this time via zoom), and I will have the privilege of passing the torch to the President-Elect, Jennifer Van Eyk.
It has been a great pleasure to serve US HUPO. These have been two quite eventful years, but also years rich in accomplishments for US HUPO. We hosted the international HUPO congress in Orlando, September 2018, a conference that was organized by Joshua LaBaer, Rob Moritz, John Yates, and me. Highlighting that our proteomics community is vibrant, active, and diverse, the US HUPO conference in Rockville, March 2019, was a wonderful success, even if it was relatively close to the international congress. I had the chance of organizing our 2019 US HUPO conference together with Aleksandra Nita-Lazar, David Fenyo, and Steve Carr, and we were delighted to see that the conference attracted the largest number of participants in over ten years.
2019 continued to be an action-packed year after the conference, as the US HUPO executive committee worked hard on transitioning the company that manages our conference and the US HUPO association. After carefully considering multiple options, it gave us great pleasure to sign a contract with Conference Solutions. They have joined the US HUPO team at the end of last year, and it has been an absolute pleasure working with Brianna Flink and her team. They have worked relentlessly on transferring information, organizing our conference, revamping our website, and on setting up locations for future conferences.
Showing the continuous growth of our field, the 2020 conference in Seattle was promising to be an even bigger success than the 2019 conference, as the number of pre-registered attendees continued to increase. We owe many thanks to our extraordinary organizing team, Birgit Schilling, Karin Rodland, Lan Huang, and Judit Villen. They have put together an exciting scientific program, with new topics, courses, and workshops, and have worked on securing funding support for the conference. We also received continued support and new support from major sponsors, Bruker, Sciex, Shimadzu, and ThermoFisher Scientific, and we thank them for their dedication to our organization. Cancelling the 2020 Seattle conference was one of the most difficult decisions that the executive committee had to make, but a correct decision as we focused on the safety and well being of our community.
To compensate in part for our lost opportunity to interact at the conference, we organized two webinars in April 2020. With these webinars, we aimed to celebrate our awardees, as well as to thank our sponsors and exhibitors by providing them with an opportunity to share with us their new technologies. Talks were given by exhibitors and all our 2020 awardees—Steve Gygi (recipient of the Donald F. Hunt Distinguished Contribution in Proteomics Award), Ruedi Aebersold (recipient of the Catherine E. Costello Lifetime Achievement in Proteomics Award), Jimmy Eng (recipient of the Gilbert S. Omenn Computational Proteomics Award), and Si Wu and Nicolas Young (the two recipients of the Robert J. Cotter New Investigator Award). The response to these webinars has been exceptionally positive, with 888 and 707 registered attendees for the two days of webinars, respectively. Given this positive response, we will continue to look for and provide avenues to interact throughout the year and to expand the reach and impact of US HUPO. As part of this effort, we have now initiated a Virtual Outreach Working Group as part of the Board of Directors.
I will finish by thanking you again for giving me the privilege to act as the President of US HUPO. I know that the organization is in excellent hands, as the Presidency will now transition to Jenny. Please join me in welcoming our new President, Jennifer Van Eyk.
Best regards,
Ileana Cristea
Professor
Director of Graduate Studies
Department of Molecular Biology
Princeton University
