I am honored and privileged to have the opportunity to serve as the 2011 president of the Materials Research Society. As I survey our recent achievements, I can hardly imagine there being a more exciting time for the Society. These past few years have seen a remarkable expansion of MRS activities and their impact. In the area of technical programming, we are currently planning co-sponsored meetings in three different countries through partnerships with the Sociedad Mexicana de Materiales, the Japanese Society of Applied Physics, and the European Materials Research Society (E-MRS).

Our efforts in advocacy have produced widely acclaimed publications on energy, joint policy studies with other major scientific societies, and co-sponsorship with E-MRS and MRS-China of the upcoming World Materials Summit in Washington, DC. Also, in the coming year we will join the Minerals, Metals & Materials Society in co-sponsoring a congressional fellow in addition to the fellow we co-sponsor with the Optical Society of America, and we will continue with our successful program of Congressional Visits Days.

As a result of our recent strategic initiative in communications, MRS has now entered into a long-term partnership with Cambridge University Press to enhance MRS publications and electronic content. The coming year will see us launch our first new journal since the Journal of Materials Research began 25 years ago, and it will be followed in subsequent years by other technical publications as well as new products for news and education.

By far the most impressive effort to have come to fruition this year is the new NOVA series MAKING STUFF. Beginning in January, this WGBH production will air on over 300 television stations around the country, bringing materials research into the living room. For those of us who grew up with this award-winning series, seeing materials research take center stage has special meaning. With this accomplishment, Amy Moll and the rest of the Public Outreach Committee, which she chairs, have brought MRS to its high watermark in outreach and education. More importantly, they have helped us to realize just how big an impact we as volunteers can have on the MRS mission of “advancing materials and improving the quality of life.”

Accomplishments such as the production of MAKING STUFF have been the result of dedication and hard work by teams of volunteers working in partnership with staff at MRS headquarters. They have taken years of sustained effort to become a reality. Surprisingly, these long-term projects have been more easily pursued at the level of the Operating Committees than at that of the Board of Directors, due to the board-centric, one-year cycle that has characterized the strategic planning process in which each new president often sets a new direction. This brings me to the most significant change in the Society’s way of doing business to occur in recent years. To alter this self-defeating dynamic, the board has transformed the process through which we create our future. Strategic planning is now a multiyear effort that spans many presidential terms and engages large segments of MRS, as well as outside advisors. Without this longer term approach, the partnership with Cambridge and the changes to our communications portfolio could not have come to pass.

As our work on strategic planning for the communications portfolio reaches completion over the next year, we will begin to use this process to define the future of MRS meetings. Along the way we will introduce yet another transformative change to the way we do business. The operating committees will be active partners with the board and headquarters in charting the future direction of the meetings portfolio, both through direct participation on the task forces that carry out the planning process, as well as through charges to those committees to support that process. In addition, we will work to replace the “stove piped” structure of our operating committee–board relationship with an interconnected network of committees that utilize one another in order to achieve their objectives. Through the sustained collective action of this broader network and a common vision of the Society’s future, our accomplishments can exceed even the remarkable successes of this past year.