Chairperson's Update

July 2006

If you are reading this, then you have found our updated web site and I need to thank a few folks. First, to B. J. Sadfie, for his work in maintaining our former web site, and second, to Mitch Maifeld, for taking over those responsibilities and creating the current web site. Years ago, no one had or needed a web site, and now a well-organized, well-designed web site is an absolute requirement of any organization or company for internal and external communication. Thanks, guys.

Also, thanks to Dr. Carlotta Berry who has served as Secretary for the Central Tennessee Section for the past year and a half. Dr. Berry has served as Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at Tennessee State University. She is moving to a new position in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute, Indiana. We appreciate her work as Secretary of the Section and will miss her but certainly wish her the very best in her new opportunity.

Your Executive Committee met recently and decided to hold elections for the 2007 Section officers this fall. Mike Puckett has agreed to head the Nominations Committee, and you will be hearing more about this in the near future. Our objective is to complete the elections process in time for an efficient and effective transition of responsibilities to the new officers.

We have also modified our email system for communicating with our members. Our old list, which was maintained manually, included a number of people who were not IEEE members, but who wanted to receive information about our Section meetings. We are now using a distribution list from the IEEE Headquarters that only contains IEEE members and, regrettably, non-members will no longer receive our meeting notifications. We certainly want to encourage attendance at our meetings regardless of IEEE membership, so if you know of a non-member who would be interested in attending one of our meetings, we encourage you to forward our email meeting notification to that person.

With the end of summer on the horizon, we will be scheduling Section meetings for the fall. We look forward to seeing you there!

Paul Stinson