Executive Officer's Column

The 1998 meeting is now past us and we look forward to 1999. We had a most interesting session in Biloxi this year: the weather alternated between a mock hurricane complete with tornado watches and glorious, tropical sunshine. It made for unusual days. We had about 800 attendees at our gathering and seem to have lost no one to the weather or the casinos. Remember that we meet in Tupelo in 1999. I hope you had the opportunity to visit with the people from there who were in our exhibit area. They are enthusiastic about hosting us and we are enthusiastic about trying to visit a different part of our state.

There are many parts of a successful meeting. Everyone sees the Division Heads and elected officers of the Academy. We also need to pass along great thanks to Cynthia Huff, our Associate Executive Officer. Cynthia is the glue that holds the ever expanding parts together. She is able to calm the sometimes stormy waters of meeting arrangements and to organize all of the little picky details that are necessary.

We hope you have noticed that recently we have begun publishing the papers of the winners of the Junior Academy of Sciences competitions. We have been fortunate to have one of our Directors, Rosalina Hairston, use her fund raising skills for the benefit of this project. She has done a marvelous job attracting funding from various companies. These companies are specifically thanked in the heading of each article supported. We would like to thank them here for their encouragement of our young scientists.--John Boyle