Academy implements new member services system

Among the Academy's most important goals is to serve the needs of our members, subscribers, and attendees of NYAS events. To improve our customer service, the Academy recently entered into a partnership with the American Institute of Physics (AIP), who in addition to maintaining its own professional society, also provides membership services to other scientific organizations. We are pleased to announce that on June 1, AIP will assume responsibility for managing the Academy's member services.

Users of the Academy's Web site will notice some changes in our online forms. These will make it easier to join the Academy and renew your membership, register for events, and purchase volumes of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. The new site will also help you to create an online profile that will let you stay abreast of Academy events and publications in your fields of interest.

Members will be receiving new member identification numbers that will enable you to take full advantage of your benefits. Following the changeover, there will be new telephone numbers and e-mail addresses for answering any questions you might have related to your transactions with the Academy.

We appreciate your patience as we implement this new system, but are sure that you will find that it will enhance the value of your support of the Academy.

Upcoming NYAS conferences

In Macbeth, Shakespeare calls sleep the "chief nourisher in life's feast." If so, then our genes are an important ingredient in ensuring a quiet night's rest. Researchers have found that genes play an important role in regulating how we sleep, and have linked specific genes to a variety of sleep disorders. On June 20, the Academy brings several of these investigators together for a special full-day conference exploring the genetics of sleep regulation. Register now to learn how animal models are yielding clues to the genes that control sleep, and how disruptions in sleep can affect other systems in the body, influencing metabolic dysfunction and even cancer.

Silence of a different sort will be the focus of the upcoming Fourth Annual Meeting of the Oligonucleotide Therapeutics Society. On October 15-18 in Boston, NYAS convenes leading researchers from academia and industry who are using short RNA's to disable or regulate gene expression. The event offers a unique opportunity to foster synergies between different approaches to oligonucleotide research, and features a keynote address from Nobel laureate Phillip Sharp, whose lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has played a prominent role in the field of RNA interference. Click here for more information and to take advantage of early bird pricing.

For more information on these fields, visit the Academy's eBriefings for reports and multimedia from our previous conferences on sleep disorders and the first and second annual meetings of the OTS.

Materials science and medicine

As biology, chemistry, and engineering have converged in recent years, they have begun to yield new materials to address some very old clinical problems. To learn about some advanced applications, visit our new eBriefing on novel materials for regenerative medicine, which reports on work by Joel Schneider (University of Delaware), who is developing new peptide-based materials that can gel in wounds and enable tissue regeneration by locking cells or drugs into place. Or see our recent coverage of a recent conference on nanotechnology and biotechnology hosted by the Hunter College Center for Study of Gene Structure and Function. It features presentations by Chad Mirkin (Northwestern University) on how gold-oligonucleotide hybrid particles can be used as medical diagnostics, and Tejal Desai (University of California, San Francisco) on how nanotechnology can be exploited to deliver traditional drug-based therapies in a more targeted and controlled way. You can also go to www.nyas.org/ebriefing to see all of our recent releases.

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