Dear SMBE members,

I am writing to you today on behalf of the SMBE Council to apprise you of some changes we are making to the names and criteria for awards and honors conferred by our Society. Specifically, we wish to refresh the awards and honors in ways that are more descriptive of the achievements and more focused on the awardee. This is part of our ongoing efforts and commitment to make our Society more equitable and welcoming to diverse members of our community worldwide. The immediate changes we are making are:

1. We are expanding the criteria for our faculty excellence awards from a more traditional one-dimensional definition of scientific excellence to incorporate other important axes of scientific leadership and excellence, including mentoring and service.
2. We are renaming the awards to better reflect our focus on the awardees themselves, whom we will celebrate and recognize with plenary talks and conferred awards at our annual meetings.
3. Among our most prestigious awards are those that we confer to our best graduate students, whom we highlight at a symposium at our annual meetings. In the past, we have traditionally selected eight finalists and chosen one winner. Each year, this decision is made difficult because we are comparing often vastly different sub-disciplines of molecular evolution. From this year on, we will now name all eight selected students (and early postdocs) as recipients of this award and celebrate all their remarkable achievements at our annual meetings.

We owe an enormous debt to the giants in our field who laid the foundation for our discipline and enabled our society to thrive practically and intellectually.  We remain an international organization that facilitates association and communication among molecular evolutionists with the ultimate goal of pushing forward the field of molecular evolution. Today’s adjustments ensure our society stays true to the original vision of SMBE, while also being unafraid to change.

As always, SMBE Council members remain responsive to your comments and suggestions.

Sincerely yours,
Harmit Malik
President, SMBE

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We're delighted to announce that the Society for Molecular Biology & Evolution is now accepting proposals for symposium topics for the 2021 Annual Meeting.  SMBE 2021 is taking place virtually 4-8 July (3-7 July in the Unites States). The deadline for symposia applications is 2 April 2021 (23:59 GMT).

Please visit HERE to access information and the submission portal.

Proposals will be reviewed by the committee with around 20-30 topics selected for inclusion within the scientific programme.

Format for SMBE 2021:  SMBE 2021 will run across three geographical hubs. We hope in this way to make the conference as accessible as possible across our global community. All presentations will be pre-recorded and discussion rooms will be available for all participants to interact live online with speakers. There will also be designated poster space and live interactive poster sessions.

Proposals should span the range of interests of SMBE members, including exciting new scientific developments, and should represent the geographic and gender diversity of our membership. 

Symposium Proposal Guidelines

Please review the following guidelines before submitting a Symposium Proposal:

• Individuals can only be listed as an organiser for one symposium proposal, although organisers can be listed as an invited speaker on another proposal.

• Each symposium will include one invited speaker plus a number of contributed speakers.

• All invited speakers included within a symposium should have verbally agreed to be involved before the proposal is submitted.

• An individual can only give one talk at the SMBE meeting, so in the event that a speaker is invited to two successful symposium applications the organisers should consider a back up.

• Symposium organisers should provide a description of the symposium (2

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Dear SMBE Members,

I am writing to solicit nominations for SMBE President-Elect and 2 Councillors whose terms will begin on January 1, 2022. All of these positions are for a duration of three years.

As the society grows and thrives, council members play very important roles in guiding its development and in soliciting and implementing programs that support our members, while enriching opportunities for young scientists from around the world, and overseeing our two excellent journals (MBE and GBE) as well as our annual meeting and satellite meetings.

Nominations will be reviewed by the nomination committee* who will then put forward a slate of two candidates for each position for membership vote. Past and current council members are listed HERE.

Please send nominations with a brief statement in support of your suggestion (self nominations are accepted) Juliette de Meaux <jdemeaux@uni-koeln.de> and Nadia Singh <secretary.smbe@gmail.com>. 

*Nota bene: we ask the nominators to confirm explicitly that the person they are nominating has already confirmed their willingness to run for office.

Please send your nominations by Friday, April 09, 2021.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Sincerely yours,
Nadia Singh
Secretary of SMBE, on behalf of the Nomination Committee*

*The Nomination Committee is composed as follows:

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Dear SMBE Members:

Want to meet like-minded colleagues from all over the world?

Wish you could have an international conference in your field closer to home?

SMBE is looking for a local host for its 2024 international meeting. Informal expressions of interest should be from a prospective local organizing committee of scientists headed by an SMBE member and should reach SMBE President-Elect James McInerney by 30 March 2021. Full proposals will need to be submitted using the SMBE template by 15 June 2021. Please email your proposal to smbe.contact@gmail.com.

For details of meeting organization, please see the SMBE Conference Guidelines (and specifically Appendix 2 which outlines the format of proposals).

The primary role of the local organizing committee will be to plan the scientific programme. All other aspects of the organization will be done in association with SMBE representatives and a professional conference organizer appointed by SMBE in consultation with the local organizers.

SMBE rotates its meetings geographically to encourage international participation. For 2024, we are particularly requesting proposals from the Americas. The next three years' meetings will be virtual (2021), in Auckland, NZ (2022), and in Ferrera, Italy (2023).

Please note that SMBE is not interested in proposals from professional conference organizers.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

James McInerney
President-Elect, SMBE
smbe.contact@gmail.com

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Dear SMBE Members,

I am delighted to be writing to you on behalf of the SMBE Council to report back that the membership voted strongly in favor of our Values Statement and Code of Conduct. We have now incorporated these in our documentation (see http://www.smbe.org/smbe/ABOUT/ValueStatement.aspx and http://www.smbe.org/smbe/ABOUT/CodeofConduct.aspx).

We pledged earlier to work even harder to promote inclusion, diversity, and equity in SMBE, see https://www.smbe.org/smbe/HOME/TabId/37/ArtMID/1395/ArticleID/93/SMBE-Announcement-What-can-we-do-to-fight-intolerance-racism-and-discrimination-now-and-in-the-future.aspx. The new Values Statement and a Code of Conduct are an important part of this initiative.

Wishing you all a safe and peaceful remainder of 2020 and that the next year will be a better one.

On behalf of the Council,

Marta L. Wayne
SMBE President

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