From the Chief Executive

What an exciting year 2018 is for the Microbiology Society – it is the beginning of our new five-year strategy, which has two crucial features. First, it recognises that for microbiology to play its full part in addressing the world’s opportunities and challenges, we must be extremely ambitious. Second, it re-emphasises that the Society’s role in these opportunities is helping to unlock the potential of the knowledge of you, our members. Your expertise is a unique resource with huge potential, and by being part of the Society, you are helping to get the subject the attention it deserves.

We are already doing many things to turn this ambition into reality. Some are straightforward – such as expanding the Conferences Team so we can take advantage of more of your ideas for inspiring scientific meetings. Others are behind-the-scenes things that affect the efficiency with which the staff can serve the microbiology community.

All of the things we are doing aim to support you in your careers, and one of the most important will be the appointment of a new Member Engagement Officer to ensure that you have easy access to all of the opportunities the Society offers in publishing, professional development, policy, communications and other areas.

As we redouble our efforts to ensure that your expertise has the maximum impact, it will be imperative that we focus our efforts on those areas that really matter. The Early Career Microbiologists’ Forum is already giving a voice to microbiologists who are setting out on your careers, and we are now looking to make sure that mid-career researchers are also heard. A new working group, chaired by Tadhg Ó Cróinín from University College Dublin, has started looking at this and we would welcome views from any mid-career members.

Another important development will be a major project to define the ‘state of microbiology’. Many members say that the discipline of microbiology is becoming harder to recognise in labs, but many of you also report that there is more microbiology than ever going on – it’s just sometimes called something else. The Society is welcoming to anyone interested in microbes, whether or not they call themselves a microbiologist, and we hope that the new project will in time provide a stimulating and interactive way for members to see where you sit in the overall microbiology landscape, and what exciting routes may be open to you.

The Microbiology Society is one of the few societies that still publishes its own journals, ploughing all the income back into science, so we are also investing in our publishing activities. Just as our grants and conferences programmes provide you with the first opportunity to apply for funding or present your work in friendly and supportive ways, our journals do the same for your published papers.

Looking forward to the Society’s 75th Anniversary in 2020, it is interesting also to look back at what the Society’s founders set out to do. At their first meeting, they wanted to “link up the interests” of people studying different aspects of microbiology, they wanted to “learn a lot by meeting other types” of scientists, and to “enable researchers of different types to meet and talk and get to know one another”. These days, we encapsulate the same thoughts in our mission statement: “advancing the understanding and impact of microbiology by connecting and empowering communities worldwide”.

Communication is the key to doing this effectively – communication among the members, communication between the members and others such as policy-makers or the public, and communication between the membership at large and the staff, Council and Committee members.

I have no doubt that when we come to review our progress at the end of the five years of the new strategy, we will be proud of the impact members of the Microbiology Society are having on scientific, environmental, economic, social and medical aspects of life. Please get in touch and let me know how you want to make that happen.

Peter Cotgreave

Chief Executive
[email protected]