Early Career Microbiologists' Forum: the Executive Committee

The Early Career Microbiologists’ (ECM) Forum is a new initiative that will bring our early career members together to play a key role in shaping the Society. This is part of a wider programme to enhance the professional development of our members, and is a fantastic chance to get involved with the Society, have your say, and improve your transferrable skills.

The Forum will provide a voice for early career researchers within our membership – enabling early career members to influence the work of the Society across all of its activities, including conference content, policy work, our journals and our professional development activities. We hope that it will play a major role in helping shape the future development and governance of the Society. Quite simply, we want to hear from you and learn what you want to see us do.

To enable the Forum to feed into the way the Society is run, it will be represented by an Executive Committee – voting for these representatives will take place later this month. Early career members of the Society have to register their interest in joining the Forum, to be able to vote for the Executive Committee. Each member of the Executive Committee will join one of the Society’s Committees or Council. This way, the Forum will have representation throughout our governance, giving it a real opportunity to bring the ECM viewpoint to all proceedings, feeding in the thoughts of the wider Forum.

The roles that will be available are:

• The Chair – who will work with Council and the Professional Development Committee and be a member of both Council, which governs the Society, and the Professional Development Committee.
• The Treasurer – who will look after the financial responsibilities of the Forum.
• The Conferences Representative – who will work with the Scientific Conferences Committee, which considers the scientific content of Society meetings.
• The Programmes Representative – who will work with both the Policy and Publishing Committees, which look after the Society’s impact in the policy arena and oversee our journal outputs, respectively.
• The Communications Representative – who will work with the Communications Committee, which oversees Microbiology Today, education and outreach activities and the Society’s other communications channels.
• The International Representative – who will work with the International Working Group, which ensures the Society is considering its international endeavours.

Each Executive Committee member will serve a term of two years, to enable as many ECMs to benefit from a term in office as possible. Of course, we want to ensure the work and structure of the Forum is set by the Forum itself, so the committee will evolve from these positions over time.

We think this will be a great opportunity for early career microbiologists within our membership. Join today to be involved in the Forum’s activities and make the most of the opportunity to have a real impact on our current work and future direction. Contact: [email protected]

MARIA FERNANDES

Professional Development Officer
[email protected]