Dear All:
I heartily thank you for attending 22nd HFES/OETG business meeting today. It was great seeing you all after two pandemic years. We had a very successful meeting today. I have attached today's presentation slides to this e-mail. I greatly appreciate your passionate suggestions to revamp or outgrow the OETG network and activities. Since the new committee has not been elected yet, the present committee will be active till the new committee is formed. Based on the conversation, I will take the following steps:
1. One of the main concerns of today's meeting was that the present committee, under my leadership, discontinued the OETG student award initiated by the previous committee in 2019. I take full responsibility for this. However, based on the present HFES president, Dr. Carolyn Sommerich's suggestions, today's attendees agreed to continue the awards. I greatly appreciate that the senior members also suggested forming an "award selection committee," in addition to the reviewer's scores, so that we can select the awardees through an extensive scientific review process. I very much liked the idea. However, I want to see the future committee adopt this excellent suggestion, as we are almost at the end of this year. To this end, I will follow the past "practices" and select the best student and independent researcher awards. The past practice was to determine the awardees based on the reviewer's scores. I will also announce the awardees when I announce the new committee via the webinar session. This will happen sometime in mid-November, but obviously before the Thanksgiving break.
2. We received several nominations during today's meeting. If you are interested in serving the next OETG committee: newsletter editor, program chair, or chair-elect positions, OR wants to nominate someone, please e-mail directly to me (or respond to this thread) with their e-mail address, and I will follow up with them. I wish to receive all nominations by Wednesday, October 19, 2022. Then, I will create and share the poll with the community sometime next Friday or Thursday. My goal is to complete the election process by November 3. Then, I will arrange a webinar session to declare the elected OETG members for the 2023 - 2024 terms on the week of November 10 (it must be before November 18 since I will be visiting my home country from November 19 till December 3). FYI, the roles of each position are mentioned in the attached PowerPoint slides.
3. During the aforementioned webinar session, I will announce the 2022 OETG awardees and survey results. I greatly appreciate it if you guys join me in congratulating the awardees and the new members.
Please don't forget to fill up the survey questionnaire. We have received only 17 responses so far. People who did not attend today's meeting, and if you have any suggestions, please feel free to mention them in the survey form.
Thank you, and have a great conference week!
Suman
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Suman Chowdhury PhD
Assistant Professor
Lubbock TX
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