Notes from the UEC

2008 Joint NSLS and CFN Users' Meeting

March 13, 2008

Dan Fischer
UEC Chair
NIST
dfischer@nist.gov

Archives:
March 2008
November 2007
August 2007
April 2007

The 2008 Joint NSLS and CFN Users' Meeting will be here shortly – May 19-21! Stony Brook University Professor John Parise, Co-chair of this year's meeting, and the entire organizing team have been extremely busy putting together a very exciting program for this year's meeting and I hope many of you will attend. I also would like to remind all of you to take part in nominating your colleagues as an NSLS Special Interest Group (SpIG) representative, for the Julian Baumert PhD Thesis Award, and for the NSLS Users' Executive Committee (UEC) Community Service Award.

The beginning of 2008 has brought a lot of excitement to the NSLS community with six NSLS scientific strategic planning workshops and seven NSLS-II technique-based workshops. These workshops were all well attended and have created an atmosphere of anticipation regarding NSLS-II going forward. To that end, it has been my pleasure to represent the UEC on Steve Hulbert's NSLS transition planning team, which meets weekly. During the past couple of months, the team has individually met with the NSLS participating research teams to facilitate the NSLS-II transition process. These meetings have been useful for disseminating information and encouraging involvement by all parties. I think we are off to a good start.

Finally, if you attended our last NSLS Town Meeting, you heard the disappointing news delivered by NSLS Chair Chi-Chang Kao regarding the FY2008 NSLS budget. Among the cost-saving steps to be taken by the facility is a 10 percent reduction in operating hours. I want to echo and strongly support Chi Chang's sentiment: "We will get through this together and make the NSLS an even better place to do the best science."