Preface
Dear colleagues,
this is my first preface as the president of the DGZ. On behalf of all members of the executive committee, I would like to thank you for
your votes in the elections for the new executive committee and advisory board. We really feel honored and we would like to thank
you for your confidence. The election of Prof. Carien Niessen (vice president), Oliver Gruss (CEO), Klemens Rottner (Vice CEO) and myself
(president) was approved at our last member meeting held during the International DGZ Meeting 2014 in Regensburg.
New bylaws
On the member meeting, we also have ratified new bylaws. These new bylaws were necessary to allow for the the legal possibility to
perform our next elections through an online system. We prefer such an online ballot, not only for reasons of convenience and costs
but also likely allows us to mobilize a higher number of voters. In the course of this bylaws modification we have also updated a few
other aspects. You can read about all changes in the minutes of the member meeting, which are published together with the new
bylaws in this issue of Cell News. For legal reasons the bylaws have to be published in German, I apologize to those of our readers who
do not understand German.
Next International Meeting in Cologne
We are happy to announce that
the next International Meeting of the DGZ will be held from March 24-27, 2015, in Cologne
. I am
very grateful to Carien Niessen that she has agreed to organize the meeting together with her colleagues (Angelika Noegel, Thorsten
Hoppe, Sara Wickström, and Sandra Iden) at the university campus. On a program workshop, we have recently defined a cocktail of
interesting topics for an exciting meeting. You will find a little preview at the bottom of this page. The German Society of Cell Biology
is aware of gender issues and promotion of young scientists. Thus, we are proud to announce a roughly equal balance of male and
female chairpersons in our Symposia, Plenary Lectures and dedicated Young Scientist Sessions (see below).
Future meetings
With regard to meetings in the near future, I would also like to invite you to register for our special interest meetings this summer.
Registration for "Life at the Edge - The Nuclear Envelope In Nucleoplasmic Transport, Genome Organization And Cell Cycle Regulation"
is still open until June 2nd
), and until July 7th you can also register for the "Annual International
Dictyostelium Conference" (
, which is held under the auspices of the DGZ this year. Both meetings will take place
at the Seminaris Hotel in Potsdam at the Lake Templin.
Promotion of young scientists
As you can read in the minutes of the member meeting, we have consolidated our finances in 2013 and are eager to increase our
assets again in 2014. As soon as we feel able to do so, we will again organize a Young Scientist Meeting, since promotion of young
researchers should in my opinion be one of the major objectives of our society. Following this objective, we have decided to include
Young Scientist Sessions in our International Meeting in Cologne 2015. These sessions will be held as satellite meetings in the morning
of March 24th. So if you are a young postdoc willing to organize a symposium on an interesting topic in cell biology, don't hesitate to
contact the DGZ office for further details. We are able to organize rooms, sponsor registration fees for your speakers and to give some
additional, financial support.
I would also like to encourage young scientists to submit an article on their scientific work for publication in Cell News. You'll find the
instructions for authors at
. You can take the articles of our price winners in the current
issue as examples.
Finally, for those of you who have not yet come across my research, please have a look inside this issue of CellNews. There you can find
a review on my favorite scientific topic. Even if you are not a young scientist anymore, please feel invited to use CellNews as platform
to introduce yourself or your research group the Cell Biology community in Germany and even beyond. You'll find a broad audience
and keep your copyrights. CellNews is YOUR journal and the DGZ is YOUR society. We as the executive committee appreciate any kind
of input and contributions.
Yours,
Ralph Gräf
(president)
International DGZ meeting
March 24 – 27 2015 in Cologne.
Topics will include among others:
1. cell biology of aging
2. cell polarity
3. neurobiology
4. mitochondria
5. new actin functions
6. signal transduction and trafficking
8. Immunity
