Dear OCPA members,
Greetings and best wishes for the Chinese New Year! As we enter the seventeenth year of OCPA, we are pleased to report that OCPA continues to grow as an organization serving the interest of Chinese physicists worldwide. This growth is a result of the hard work of many dedicated OCPA members. In particular, we would like to take this opportunity to thank Jen-Chieh Peng, the outgoing OCPA president, for his superb leadership during the past two years!
The highlight of the OCPA 2006 activities is undoubtedly the tremendously successful 5th OCPA Conference in Taipei. The large turn-out (including many young students), the excellent quality of the plenary and parallel talks, the sense of excitement permeating throughout the conference, and the active interactions among physicists, some of whom met for the first time, all testify to the success of this truly memorable event. The organizers of the 5th OCPA Conference, the co-chair, Tu-Nan Chang and Maw-Kuen Wu, members of local committee, and Division coordinators, deserve much credit for their tireless effort. Our newly formed Status of Women in Physics Committee organized a half-day Symposium on women physicists’ concerns with reports from Taiwan, China, and North America. This drew heavy participation from both female and male audiences with long animated discussions. We are happy to see that many of our female colleagues are more willing to join OCPA and be active in OCPA affairs. We now look forward to the next OCPA6 Conference to be held in 2009!
We would also like to take this opportunity to welcome the 2007-2008 OCPA Officers, Councilors, and Coordinators. We are fortunate to have many accomplished and dedicated physicists volunteering their service for OCPA and hope more young physicists can join us in our future activities.
We would also like to point out that a Bylaws Committee, appointed by Keh-Fei Liu and chaired by Bing-Lin Young, has been deliberating on several proposed modifications of our bylaws. As you all know, one of the important recommendations of the Bylaws Committee is to change our name to IOCPA, International Organization of Chinese Physicists and Astronomers. Once the legal procedure of name change is completed, we will officially adopt the new name for ourselves.
We are pleased to report that both the OCPA Outstanding Young Researcher Award and the Achievement in Asia Award have continued to attract candidates of excellent caliber. The efforts of nominating institutions and the contributions of the selection panel members are the crucial components of the success of OCPA awards. Thanks to a generous donation from Tu-Nan Chang, the Achievement in Asia Award for the next few years will be dedicated to the memory of Robert T. Poe.
We are also very grateful to many OCPA members who have responded to Jen-Chieh Peng’s call for donation to the OCPA general fund. It has led to a total contribution of over $6500. These generous donations, as well as our increased membership fees, will help support other OCPA sponsored activities; such as Summer Schools and receptions in APS meetings.
We also want to thank Anyi Li, Wei Chen and Haiyan Gao for the beautiful makeover of the OCPA web home page. We hope our members will make more use of our web for communications and provide news worthy items for the “We Hear That” section.
We look forward to hearing from you for inputs and suggestions. We count on your ideas and participations to make OCPA an even stronger organization which can better serve us all.
With our best wishes to you for a happy Chinese New Year,