Members Newsletter July 2016 
​International Society for Microbial Ecology    2/4     

 

 

Intro by ISME President Janet Jansson                                                                 

The clock is ticking with only a couple of weeks until our meeting in Montreal. Preliminary numbers for ISME16 are looking great! We have received 2070 abstract submissions to date and we estimate to have over 2000 registrants. The program has been developed and can already be found online. We have tripled the number of travel grants over previous conferences, with an allocation of 90 Travel Grants, including Postdocs as recipients for the first time. Soon the conference app will be available too but more on that can be read in the ISME16 news update sent on July 12th. 
 

The ISME society awards have been announced; The Tiedje award winner is Sallie (Penny) Chisholm from MIT, USA. The Young Investigators Award winner is Gene Tyson, University of Queensland, Australia. Congratulations to both award winners! Please read more at: isme16/awardees

Congratulations are also in order for eminent microbial ecologists and ISME members, James Prosser and Anne Glover who were recently awarded to be Fellows of The Royal Society; the scientific academy of the UK and the Commonwealth. These tremendous achievements reflect recognition of scientific excellence in the field of microbial ecology.

In addition, in his role as Past-President of ISME and Chair of the IWA Biocluster, respectively, Michael Wagner recently informed Lutgarde Raskin (University of Michigan, USA) and Holger Daims (University of Vienna, Austria) that they will be co-recipients of the ISME-IWA Bio Cluster Award 2016 (Grand Prize). This prestigious prize rewards interdisciplinary research of unusual merit at the interface of microbial ecology and water/wastewater treatment.

Lastly, Mads Albertsen (Aalborg University, Denmark) was chosen by the Review and Evaluation Committee as recipient of the ISME-IWA Bio Cluster Award 2016 in the Rising Star Category. These awards will be presented to at the ISME16 Conference in Montreal. ISME would like to congratulate all of these awardees!

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Janet Jansson

The ISME Journal

2016 continues to be another busy year at ISMEJ. The quantity and quality of submissions continues to increase, making it easy to fill great issues, but difficult to judge which manuscripts are to be included.

We of course continue to thank the efforts of our volunteer reviewers, editorial board and editorial team. With an Impact Factor of 9.3 we can certainly be proud. We are also happy to welcome a new editor to the team, Michael Wagner, whose expertise and experience will be a great asset to the journal.

An important new Author Service. Springer Nature is working to assist all authors in disseminating their research swiftly and legally to the wider community, and is now able to provide authors of ismej with the ability to generate a unique shareable link that will allow anyone to read a view-only version of the published article. A similar functionality for subscribers, who would then be able to share a view-only link with non-subscribers, will also be introduced.

With regard to our authors who choose to make their articles Open Access, they are of course already ensuring that their articles can be freely accessed by anyone, immediately on publication. Open Access content can also be shared via the content-sharing scheme, providing a seamless experience for users as they read OA and non-OA articles. This content-sharing scheme is additional to all existing OA functionality. 

More information on Springer Nature’s commitment to content sharing is available here.

At ISMEJ, we continue to try to publish interesting and novel work in microbial ecology, with the hope that metrics like impact factors will take care of themselves. Thanks to the quality of work in the field, this strategy appears successful, keeping ISMEJ at the forefront of its field and among the top journals in the whole field of ecology.

Finally, 2017 will again have a new cover, and the finalists have been chosen. The top three cover images have been chosen to be used for next years' issues of The ISME Journal. You will all be able to vote for your favorite at the ISME16 meeting in Montreal – please stop by the ISMEJ booth and cast your vote! 

Sponsoring your events

If you are holding and/or organizing an event in 2017 in the field of Microbial Ecology and you wish to be sponsored by ISME then kindly submit your proposal before the deadline October 11th 2016. The form and more info about the guidelines and conditions can be found at: http://www.isme-microbes.org/about/sponsorship.
 

Introducing 2 new ISME ambassadors                       

Ramiro Logares Pier Vital

When did you become Ambassador and what country/region do you represent?

I became Ambassador during June 2015, representing Spain.

I recently became the Early-Mid Career Ambassador of ISME on September 2015. I represent the Philippines. I was nominated for this position being an Environmental Microbiology Division Representative of the Philippine Society for Microbiology, Inc.

What does it mean to you to be an Ambassador for ISME and microbial ecology?

It means promoting multiple aspects of microbial ecology in Spain, such as organizing graduate and undergraduate courses/workshops, introducing new students to the field and encouraging colleagues to publish in the ISME journal.

I believe that being an Ambassador for ISME means promoting the aims of the society including information dissemination of ISME symposia and journals, as well as conduct of activities for the advancement of microbial ecology in the Philippines. Also, an Ambassador should raise people's awareness of the significance of microbial ecology and environmental microbiology.

What upcoming activities are you particularly excited about?

I am helping with the organization of the Ramon Margalef Summer Colloquia (Microbes in a changing world: diversity and biogeochemistry) which will take place in Barcelona during July 2016. We will be able to provide travel grants and fellowships to a number of students thanks to different sponsors, one of them being the ISME Ambassador Program. The event is aimed to advanced PhD students and young postdocs, featuring multiple topics in microbial ecology. This will be a very good opportunity to promote ISME among young researchers.

I am particularly excited about the upcoming ISME convention 2016. As a new Ambassador, I would like to meet other ambassadors as well as other researchers and scientists working in microbial ecology.
 

Other Events

2nd World Congress and Expo on Applied Microbiology Istanbul  31 October - 2 November 2016

6th Summer Course on Biofilms  Singapore  3-21 July 2016

IWA Microbial Ecology in Water Engineering & Biofilms joint specialist conference Copenhagen  4-7 September 2016