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Dear all As you have probably heard from your friends or seen on facebook the INA15 conference in the Philippine was a splendid success. As we expected the venue was wonderful, a secluded beachfront hotel on a beautiful tropical island, with fabulous snorkelling a mere half hour ride away by outrigger boat. However, the local organising team of Alyssa Peleo Alampay and Allan Fernando did far more than just organise a fabulous venue. They made a massive effort to make sure it was a great event and brought in a large team of enthusiastic and talented students who made it even better, from greeting us off the plane with beads and banners, to producing beautiful conference materials, and organising a series of great evening entertainments on the beach. In between we had a very useful scientific meeting with, as ever, a strikingly diverse set of 80 delegates coming from 23 countries across the globe and ranging in experience from first year PhD students to ageing veterans of decades of microscopy and INA conferences. A lot of science was formally presented and discussed - including a series of keynote talks and three workshops - the abstract volume is now available online on the INA website (we are not mailing hardcopies to non-attendees so as to save resources for publishing regular issues). Even more importantly people spent a lot of time together sharing experiences and plotting new collaborations. … and in between the scientific and social activities we did some society business, with an INA council meeting, and business meeting. Following from this there are various changes in roles etc. to announce. In addition to the regular scientific offerings, INA meetings are a rare opportunity to get together to discuss Association business. We had a Council meeting at the start of the conference, an open business meeting at the end, and a lot of informal discussions in between. Arising from this is are various things that need to be communicated to all INA members. So, after taking a look at the nice group photo please carry on reading below. Jeremy Young (INA President), March 2015 |
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MEMBERSHIP SECRETARY & TREASURER - Sebastian Meier & Matt HamptonStacia Spaulding has been our Secretary/Treasurer since 1998, i.e. for 17 years, throughout which time she has kept our finances and membership records efficiently organised and up to date. It will be strange not exchanging regular emails with her about INA business but she has decided she has been doing the job long enough. After some debate we decided it was sensible to separate the Treasurer and Membership Secretary roles and Matt Hampton (UK) is taking over as Treasurer (he has previously been UK Treasurer) whilst Sebastian Meier (Kiel, Germany) is taking on the membership secretary role. Warning - we have been late in sending out membership renewal requests this year but you will be receiving these shortly, please do pay promptly |
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JOURNAL EDITOR - Jamie ShamrockLiam Gallagher has been editor for nearly 6 years, since taking over in 2010. He has done a fine job of producing the Journal to very high standards and getting abstract volumes typeset in record time. Editing the journal is a major task so we were pleased to find an enthusiastic new editor in Jamie Shamrock (Exxon, Houston). For once we have a significant number of articles in the pipeline and so she is working on getting issues out rapidly. She will be assisted by an editorial board team of Richard Howe (assisting with reviewing of articles), Jackie Lees (assisting with production) and Jeremy Young (generally helping and encouraging new submissions). As usual we discussed online publication as an alternative to paper publication. However, the view of council was that the JNR was one journal we actually wanted to have paper copies of - especially for articles with lots of plates. We did decide that abstract volumes would in general be circulated to the full membership as online copy only but we will maintain print circulation of the journal. |
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Email list organiser - Juan Pablo Perez PaneraHelen Gillespie has been organising the coccoliths mailing list for INA since 1994, i.e. back in the days when email was a novelty and the web barely existed. This is clearly some kind of record, but she has again decided it is time for someone else to take over. Juan Pablo Perez Panera (CINICET, Argentina) has volunteered to take over. |
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Social Media Officer - Jarrett Cruz, with Dianne RosarioJarrett has done a fine job of setting up the INA Facebook page and promoting it, he has only been doing the job since 2013 so is carrying on for now. He was on an ODP leg during the conference but Dianne Jules Rosario, of the local team, did a great job of posting content from the conference. Dianne has since volunteered to carry on with this so we now have a two person social media team! |
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Public Outreach officer - Mario CachaoThis was another new post from the Reston Meeting. Mario has been working on a promotional video project and previewed it at the business meeting. video |
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INA Foundation - trustees Mike Styzen, Dave Watkins, Richard Howe, Jean Self-TrailThe INA Foundation runs as a separate charitable operation from the rest of INA raising funds to promote the objetives of the society. In particular it supports student participation at the INA conferences through bursaries funded primarily by donations from the petroleum industry. The INA foundation team as usual also gave us a lot of good advice and added colour to the meeting - not least by sponsoring a particularly beautiful conference bag. |
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INA website editor - Jeremy YoungThe major efforts on the website have been with the Nannotax database which has ben continuously upgraded over the past two years - including most recently addition of plots of distribution data from the Neptune database and big improvements to the Farinacci catalog (almost entirely through the sparetime efforts of one nanno worker). |
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GSA 2015 booth - Jean Self-TrailThis is not a post but new initiative. Jean Self-Trail (USGS) proposed that we should have an INA booth at the GSA (Geological Society of America) conference this year (November 2015, Baltimore, USA) and volunteered to organise it, since the meeting was on her home ground. We decided to give this a try as away of promoting nannofossil study and the society to a large interested audience.If you are going to GSA, please make a note of this and get in touch with Jean so you can help her. |
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INA COUNCIL MEMBERS AT LARGE - opportunity/call for volunteersINA council members at large were introduced in 2004 as a way of broadening participation in running INA. They do not have specific duties but are expected to help with advising the council and to contribute toward promiton of the society and helping with conferences.These posts are time limited and so sadly Ric Jordan and Emanuela Mattioli have to retire. We welcome nominations for new council members at large (you can volunteer yourself or nominate someone else) . If we get more than two nominations we will hold a ballot. |
Some of these changes required revision of the INA Bylaws, so an amended Bylaws have now been complied..
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INA 16 - Athens, Greece, September 2017Our next full INA conference will be in 2017, there was only had one firm offer to host it but it was splendidly made and we were very happy to accept the offer at a concluding vote of the business meeting. So we will be going to ATHENS for INA16, hosted by Maria Triantaphyllou who has already proven herself a fine meeting organiser with two highly successful and well-attended INA workshops on living coccolithophores. I enjoyed working with her on those meetings and am looking forward to developing the collaboration, and we will have more to tell you shortly. |
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INA Jurassic Workshop - summer 2016, ?France
The Jurassic specialists at INA decided that a workshop on Jurassic nannofossils and especially on revison/development of zonations would be timely and they are planning to organise one in 2016, provisionally in Lyon. |
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TMS Foram/Nanno Group Meeting - 14-18th June 2015, Plymouth, England - & DISCOASTER WORKSHOP
The Micropalaeontological Society holds an annual Form and nannofossil group meeting. This years meeting will be in Plymouth (see TMS nanno group webpage and INA members are warmly invited to take part. |
More generally, we would like to encourage thematic or regional workshops on nannoplankton and will be happy to help anyone who wants to organise one. Please contact me (jeremy.young@ucl.ac.uk) in the first instance.
