• 04 AUG 14
    • 0

    Dariusz Leszczynski’s open letter to BEMS and EBEA

    From Dariusz Leszczynski

    Excerpt

    I become a member of the Bioelectromagnetics Society (BEMS) in 2001 and attended for the first time the Annual Meeting of BEMS in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Since then, I attended all annual meetings of BEMS.

    As seen from my CV, I was the two-term (six years) member of the Board of Directors, and I was Co-Chair of TPC for the BioEM 2009 in Switzerland and BEMS 2010 in South Korea. I was also Associate Editor of BEM Journal. Finally, I served in different capacities in a variety of BEMS committees. I cared, and I care of what will happen with this Society. I, as under 20% of BEMS members (47 out of 275), responded to the recent 5-questions inquiry. I am in a minority of BEMS members who are genuinely interested in the fate of BioEM, BEMS and even EBEA.

    Already before 2009 was noticed that the Society is shrinking in parallel to shrinking of research funding. Since then numerous reforms were implemented by BEMS in order to survive. These reforms, introduction of which begun with Niels Kuster”™s presidency and continued diligently afterwards, rescued BEMS. However, in my opinion, the crisis is still not over. Membership numbers are low (as of today, Aug.3, 2014 “” 275 members). These are not dwindling anymore, and a slow increase seems to be happening. It might mean that BEMS already hit the bottom, survived and the only way now is up. There is always a hard core of bioelectromagnetics researchers who, no matter how hard times are of this research, will remain members of BEMS and will come to BEMS meetings. Great. However…..

    SNIP

    Read the full letter here

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