Sally Howells & Nick Boross-Toby
The Physiological Society

https://doi.org/10.36866/pn.90.17

2–6 February 2013, Philadelphia, USA

Philadelphia greeted us with snow flurries and a biting wind, but we soon found shelter in Reading Terminal Market and filled up on some tasty local produce that gave us the strength to set up the exhibition stand. The exhibition hall was open for three days, during which time we ran a prize draw and were involved in a scavenger hunt made for high school students. We also offered delegates the chance to discuss their research during ‘meet the Editor’ sessions with Editor-in-Chief David Paterson, Deputy Editor-in-Chief Hiro Kubo, and Reviewing Editors Donald Bers, Derek Bowie, Peying Fong, Mike Sanguinetti and Richard Vaughan-Jones.

The meeting was well attended with over 5800 delegates, and many people were interested to learn about the history of the journals and The Society.

David Paterson said, “The Journal of Physiology has traditionally been the home for biophysics research, so it’s exciting to be able to promote The Journal to the delegates and remind them that it is an ideal outlet for their papers. I hope that as a result of attending this meeting, we will see an increase in submissions of top-quality biophysics papers.”

There were a number of representatives from the Editorial Board at the meeting; we all got together to evaluate the success of the meeting and discuss future developments and the direction of The Journal. We have already started planning for the next meeting in San Francisco, 2014.

Throughout the meeting we played the filmed interviews of Consulting Editors Bert Sakmann, Frances Ashcroft and Peter Hunter, as well as showing slides on the reasons to publish with The Journal of Physiology and Experimental Physiology. Delegates were particularly impressed with our free virtual issue of papers of particular relevance to biophysics. We were also pleased to be able to promote the new open access journal Physiological Reports and meet with Editor-in-Chief, Sue Wray, at the stand.

We were delighted that Consulting Editor Dame Carol Robinson was here to receive the Anatrace Membrane Protein Award and acknowledged The Journal in her talk ‘Mass Spectrometry – from peripheral proteins to membrane motors’.

Overall the meeting was a great success, and we are looking forward to the 58th Annual meeting in California – hoping that that too will coincide with the Super Bowl!