1999 Council 1a Reports: Vice President

From: George Daston
Re: Meeting budget, site selection

Program Committee/ Annual Meeting:
A total of 103 abstracts will be presented, comparable to last year's total. We have a full slate of symposia and have added discussion sessions on hot topics as an inducement to stay at the meeting through July 4. If these prove to be popular we should consider making them a regular feature of the meeting. Excluding the discussion sessions the meeting is a full day shorter than usual. We should take note of the pace of the meeting to see if this may be a viable model for future meetings. All symposia except the Public Affairs Symposium are funded. NIEHS is funding all the costs of the speakers at the symposium it has sponsored, MOD has made a gift of $12,000, and SmithKline Beecham provided $1000 to supplement the Wiley-Liss Symposium at a time when the organizers were trying to invite a speaker from Europe.

Electronic Submissions:
The electronic abstract submission went well. The vast majority of submissions were electronic. This facilitated the handling of the abstracts and in preparing camera-ready copy for the journal. There are a few glitches that we need to resolve: An undetermined, but apparently small, number of submitters did not receive confirmation that their abstracts had been accepted. We need to improve the way in which we identify submissions from students who wish to be considered for a merit award (Wilson or Taubeneck). This year's submission form only asked if the students wished to be considered for a travel award. Wiley cannot work easily with electronic submission. Their deadline for electronic submission of the program was two weeks earlier than the deadline for camera-ready copy. We opted for the latter as we needed the extra time to incorporate the OTIS and NBTS schedules. This counter-intuitive fact needs to be kept in mind for the future. All of these problems are reparable. I believe that the electronic submission has definite advantages. Given how well the system worked this year, I think that we can move the abstract submission deadline back at least two weeks and still make the publisher's deadline. Bill Landau was extremely efficient and cooperative. I recommend that we continue to work with him.

Exhibitors:
Once again, we have a large number of exhibitors, thanks to Clarissa Wilson's efforts. We have had a couple of cancellations, but still have 17 exhibitors at the meeting. Exhibitors represent a potentially important source of revenue for the Society. However, the exhibitors have told us that our meeting is not much of a business-generating opportunity for them. It appears that most will continue to come as a means of keeping their names before current and prospective clients. It is most convenient for them to exhibit for just two days. The practice of holding poster sessions in the exhibit hall on consecutive evenings appears to be a win-win for the exhibitors and the meeting attendees.

Contributions:
Contributions in support of the annual meeting have picked up. As Tony Scialli noted in his report last year, there are a lot of companies willing to contribute, they just need to be asked. This year, we have funding from exhibitors to cover the cost of receptions at both poster sessions, and from WIL Labs to cover the cost of wine at the banquet. Elsevier is covering the cost of the President's Reception, Covance has contributed $3000 for the banquet reception and Merck is providing for a student luncheon. John Rogers sought and received $5000 for student travel awards from the Welcome Fund. Clearly, the message here is that we just need to do more asking.

Sister Societies:
Sue Schantz of NBTS and I agreed on the specifics of coordinating the joint aspects of our meetings. There will be pass-through costs to NBTS for any meal functions that are "joint" between the societies, and for their share of jointly sponsored symposia. We will provide them with comp rooms that are commensurate with the number of room nights occupied by their meeting attendees. While I think this agreement is fair, it does not include our costs incurred during the year in preparing for the annual meeting. The staff has spent considerable time working with both sister societies on confirming meeting room assignments and preparing the program for printing. While the problems that we encountered this year stem largely from our unfavorable arrangements with Keystone, they point out a problem that we have no mechanism to address. Every time OTIS or NBTS calls our professional staff the meter is running and Teratology Society pays the fare. I will explain this problem to the leadership of both societies and indicate that, for fiscal reasons, we will need to ask for their cooperation in limiting their access to our staff for planning their meetings. The alternative is to ask them to compensate Teratology Society for our additional personnel costs.

Site Selection:
The ad hoc site selection committee recommended that we seek to meet in cities in 2001 and 2002. Clarissa Wilson and I visited Montreal and were impressed with the facilities at the Sheraton in the center of the city. We have signed a contract with them for June 23-28, 2001. Our total room block obligation is 1575. The single room rate is $198 Canadian, which works out to be about $135 at today's exchange rate. There is a cap in the contract guaranteeing an exchange rate to be not lower than 1.3 (Canadian to US). The Society will receive a 10% commission on each room. We tried to negotiate this down, but were unable to get a room rate that was 10% less. Therefore, I decided to accept the commission, but we should take this added revenue into account when we set the registration fee. There are only two meal functions planned, the banquet and the Wilson lunch. We will be charged for meeting room space. There are other hotels in the neighborhood, so Society members will have a choice. McGill University is only a few blocks away. There may be a possibility that students could find cheap housing there. Barbara Hales can inform us better about the possibilities. We had tentatively chosen the Little America Hotel in Salt Lake City as the site of the 2002 meeting. However, the hotel was unable to meet its verbal commitment to a mid-June date; only the July 4 week was available. It was Clarissa's advice that the other hotels in SLC were not as well suited for our needs. There is still the possibility of getting space at the Snowbird resort outside SLC, but this would be contrary to our plans of meeting in a city for 2002.
As of this writing Clarissa is soliciting proposals from other cities for the 2002 meeting. We are soliciting cities in the Pacific Northwest, including Portland, Vancouver and Anchorage, and in the Southeast, including Myrtle Beach, Charleston and Savannah. We've shelved the idea of using a mid-western city because they are either too expensive (Chicago) or perceived as being an insufficient draw (Milwaukee, Kansas City, and even Cincinnati). It should be possible to make arrangements within the next few months. It isn't too early to start planning for 2003. We have found it difficult to find meeting space even with a 4 year lead-time. I recommend that we form a new ad hoc Site Selection Committee consisting of the VP-Elect as Chair, Tony Scialli (the Past-President has to have something to do), Rick Finnell (who was on the Annual Meeting working group of the Strategic Planning Committee), an exhibitor (to be selected) and Clarissa Wilson and myself as ad hoc members. The group should meet sometime during the upcoming annual meeting. It need only meet once.

Partnerships:
I have been in contact with Society for Developmental Biology regarding the possibility of joint meetings. SDB has traditionally been holding their meeting within a few weeks of ours. However, they are still in the habit of planning their meetings only a year in advance at the discretion of the incoming President. They tend to hold their meetings on college campuses. SDB's Executive Director was very interested in the possibility of holding coinciding meetings in 2001, with SDB using McGill as its site. SDB's attendance appears to be increasing, as ours stays stagnant. It would seem to be a net positive for Teratology Society to meet jointly with SDB, given our common interests and SDB's recent popularity.