Cell News 2/2015
4
PREFACE
Dear colleagues and friends,
The current issue of
Cell News
is looking back to this year’s successful International
Meeting of the German Society for Cell Biology in Cologne with executive committee
member Carien Niessen as meeting president and numerous excellent presentations and
posters, lively discussions and a lot of thrilling new science. To highlight cell biology in
one of the neighbouring countries close to Cologne, we organized a stem cell session
together with the Dutch Society for Cell Biology.
In 2015, our society exists for 40 years, and we celebrated this birthday in a session that
impressively highlighted both relevance and excitement arising from cell biology research
every day. The reception on Tuesday and party on Thursday not only allowed informal
discussion but also networking on the dance floor. This year’s Prize winners of our Nikon
Young Scientist’s Award (Kai Kretschmar), the Binder Innovation Prize (Holger Bastians)
and the Werner Risau Prize (Ayal Ben-Zvi) provided excellent overviews of their work, and
now present their science in this issue of
Cell News
(see pp 8, 13 and 19).
Although the meeting was well visited, it is a worry to the advisory board that so few
DGZ-members attend our general international meetings, although we consider these
types of conferences to constitute key events for members to meet and interact. In order
to get more insight into potential reasons for this development and to adequately address
it, we will approach members with a short questionnaire in the near future.
We are also happy to inform you that the forthcoming International meeting will take
place in Munich from March 14
th
- 16
th
2016. Organized at the Martinsried campus,
we and Heinrich Leonhardt, who kindly agreed to serve as conference president, are
convinced that the well-known location and a scientific program of extraordinary qua-
lity will attract even more participants. The meeting will be organised in cooperation
with our colleagues in Austria belonging to the ÖGMBT (
Österreichische Gesellschaft für
Molekulare Biowissenschaften und Biotechnologie
), which will certainly enrich the
scientific program.
Being established as one of the leading conferences in the field, the Actin Dynamics
meeting organized by Theresia Stradal, Eugen Kerkhoff and executive committee mem-
ber Klemens Rottner took place from May 2
nd
- 4
th
in Regensburg. A wonderful crowd of
internationally renowned speakers and three outstanding keynote lecturers made this an
unforgettable event. However, the last session of the conference was clouded by sad news
of the unexpected death of Alan Hall, pioneer of Rho-GTPase research, Editor in Chief
of
Journal of Cell Biology
and certainly one of the most influential cell biologists of our
times. Please find more insights into Alan’s scientific legacy in a tribute provided by Chris
Marshall and numerous of his friends and colleagues published in the May 25
th
-issue of
Journal of Cell Biology
. Aside from his scientific achievements, Alan has contributed to
our society through personal contact and as invited speaker and keynote lecturer at our
conferences. He will be greatly missed!
Best regards,
The Executive Committee
Ralph Gräf
(President)
Carien Niessen
(Vice President)
Oliver Gruss
(CEO)
Klemens Rottner
(Vice CEO)
