The BSDB Newletter 2015 is out! As you might have noticed, there was no BSDB summer newsletter this year. The reason for this is that the BSDB committee has taken the sensible decision to reduce them to one edition a year. Newsletters clearly do no longer play the same role as they used to. In times of the internet, they are no longer needed to update members on new developments of society matters or in the area of Developmental Biology. This is now done far better through the BSDB website and through The Node (also see page 9 of the Newletter). However, we feel that providing an overview of the year still is a service we owe to BSDB members, and which might provide an informative document also for future generations.
This year, the BSDB has implemented the new Cheryll Tickle Prize and we proudly announce Abigail Tucker as the well-deserved inaugural Awardee of 2016 (page 14). This prize is for outstanding women in their mid-career and our chair, Ottoline Leyser, explains the underlying rationale in her welcome note (page 2). As usual, this issue contains the reports by our secretary Kim Dale (page 3), meetings officer Joshua Brickman (page 4), treasurer Chris Thompson (page 7), communications officer (page 9) and, for the first time, a joined note by our graduate student rep Alexandra Ashcroft and postdoc rep Michelle Ware who explain to us their plans to improve services for young BSDB members (page 10). We congratulate all BSDB awardees of 2015 (page 6), introduce our new committee members (page 11) and present Ana Ribeiro’s report of the Autumn Meeting 2015 (page 5). Claudio Stern makes an important case for promoting developmental biologists for prizes and politically important memberships (to which the BSDB committee is responding already; page 16), and we explain our recent decision to become a full member of the Royal Society of Biology (page 23). Finally, we present four reports of the 2015 Gurdon/The Company of Biologists Summer Studentship awardees which clearly demonstrate the success of this scheme (page 17).
I hope you enjoy this issue and, in the name of the BSDB committee, would like to wish you a happy and successful new year 2016.
Andreas Prokop (Communications officer)
P.S. If you are interested in BSDB newletters of the last 10 years, they are archived on our website.