UFFC-S President's Message - May 2018 - Nazanin Bassiri-Gharb

As I start my two-year term as the UFFC-S President, I wish to recognize the great efforts of our immediate past-President, Clark Nguyen, and all the others serving before me.  They brought us where we are today. Our Society is financially healthy; our three flagship symposia (IUS, ISAF and IFCS) are maintaining or increasing their attendance; the impact factor of  IEEE Transactions on UFFC (T-UFFC) has increased to 2.743 and the submission-to-e-publication time has been reduced to below four months; lastly, we had six new IEEE fellows appointed in 2017, bringing the number of our total Fellows to 121.
Strong Objectives
The UFFC AdCom and I are looking forward to bringing you new opportunities that support you in your technical and professional endeavors as our UFFC-Society members. Be on the look-out for these initiatives. We hope to roll out a few of them before the end of the year. Among these are some of the specific goals for my presidency such as measures to  increase recruitment and retention of our membership base through stronger promotion of our student and young professional members. We are also working to increase the cohesion and interaction between our technical groups, to create a better branding across our symposia and to establish best practices in engaging with other professional groups, within and outside IEEE.

Symposia
With 2018 under way, the first two of our symposia are approaching fast. IFCS will be held from May 22 through 24 at Lake Tahoe, U.S.A. ISAF will be held in Hiroshima, Japan from May 27 through June 1  within a joint conference with the Meeting on Ferroelectric Materials and their Applications, the Asian Meeting on Ferroelectricity and the Asian Meeting on Electroceramics, and Piezoresponse Force Microscopy Workshop. Our third flagship symposium, IUS will be also held in Japan in the city of Kobe from October 22 through 25. I am looking forward to meeting many of you in person at these meetings. I take this opportunity to thank all the volunteers that have helped in putting these symposia together.

Volunteer Opportunities
We are a Society powered by volunteers like you: people that dedicate their time and effort to making UFFC-S better and more relevant to the needs of its members. I welcome all of you to get more involved in the UFFC organization. Please check out the volunteer opportunities page on our website for current openings. While this page provides information about the latest volunteer opportunities, those interested to contribute some of their time to ongoing efforts are also very welcome. Feel free to contact me, the VP of your technical area, or any of the other administrative committee members for advice on how to get involved.

New VPs for the Technical Areas
On that note, I would like to welcome our new VPs for the technical areas: Sandy Cochran from the University of Glasgow for Ultrasonics; Jacob Jones from North Carolina State University for Ferroelectrics; and Elizabeth Donley from NIST for Frequency Control. You can find their contact information, as well as those for all our other new AdCom members, under the Leadership tab of the UFFC website, here.

If you have any suggestions about initiatives that UFFC-S can undertake, please contact me.

Nazanin Bassiri-Gharb
IEEE UFFC President