The group had it's first official meeting at the 2014 TWS National Conference in Pittsburg. We discussed goals, organization, and elected our first set of officers. If you missed that first meeting - check out the meeting minutes below. And be sure to join us at the next conference!
MOLECULAR ECOLOGY
WORKING GROUP – Initial Meeting Minutes
10/09/2014 at TWS
National Conference in Pittsburgh, PA
1) Introductions – 26 people attended,
each introduced themselves
2) MEWG Mission Statement & Scope of
Activity
·
Broad goals include:
o
Professional network for information sharing
§
Bringing together all people doing all things
molecular
o
Providing information and training to students
o
Conservation management
o
A place to go to as a resource (expertise) for
FWS and state agencies
o
Sponsoring workshops and symposia that are
beneficial because they reach out to other professionals who may have research
or management uses for genetic data but little experience using molecular
techniques
o
Playing a role in TWS (resources for the larger
TWS community)
§
Expert opinions
§
Position statements
§
Fact sheets
3) Election of Officers & Board Members
·
We will plan to have 2 year terms with rotating
elections so that some positions are elected each year (note - this will entail
some positions having an initial 1 year term).
·
Initial elections were made by Yay-Nay votes of
those present, future elections will entail online balloting of all active
(i.e. paid) members.
·
Officer Positions:
o
Created according to guidance from standard TWS
working group charters
o
Chair - Stacie Robinson
§
Represent working group in TWS council
§
Submit annual report
o
Vice-Chair - Emily Latch
§
Serve as Chair-elect
§
Duties shares with Chair
o
Secretary/Treasurer - Lynne Gardner
§
Meeting minutes
§
Management of finances and reporting
o
Communications Officer - Valorie Titus
§
Website/Social medica maintenance
§
Blog / Newsletter circulation
o
Student Representative – Ashley Wurth
§
Represent student concerns
§
Assist in outreach / bridging professional and
student communities
·
Executive/Advisory Board:
o
Created in an effort to expand leadership and
participation. We tried to ensure
flexibility and did not create rules for board membership, but set the goals to
be inclusive and have broad representation of various sectors:
§
Federal/State agencies – Sara Oyler-McCance
§
Academia – Randal DeYoung
§
Students – Darren Wood
§
NGOs – Steven Spear
§
Communications enthusiasts – Kristin Brzeski
4) Promotion and Recruitment
·
Try to reach out to and recruit interested
undergraduates
·
Recruit from regional TWS meetings by sponsoring
sessions
·
Partner with Student Development WG to get word
out and recruit members
·
Have a mentoring program where students with
specific interests can sign up to be paired with an expert
·
Posting advertisements for open graduate/postdoc
position in members’ labs
·
Readers of FB/blog/website should be able to get
a sense of who is in the MEWG and what is happening in ME research
·
Available resources, in terms of laboratory
equipment
·
Sharing lanes on Illumina
·
New equipment people have
·
Access and sharing of computing clusters
·
TWS journals are looking for special sections
from working groups for communications
·
Posting of meeting minutes on website
·
Using a hashtag search to get new research out
to MEWG community
·
Newsletters should have blurbs from students and
photos
·
List of citations of recent literature that has
been published since the last newsletter was distributed
·
Links to evoldir and ecology-L
·
Possible Workshops/Symposia
§
Help to people unfamiliar with molecular
techniques but want to use them
§
Sample storage and biobanking
§
Training for MEWG members in biometrics
§
Pairing with Climate WG to address questions of
adaptive capacity
§
Study design for molecular questions (sampling
design)
§
New genomic methods to address questions
