This year will bring the 75th Meeting of the Southeastern Section of the American Physical Society. It will be hosted by North Carolina State University, Thursday, October 29 – Saturday, November 1, in Raleigh. Because North Carolina is reasonably central to the SESAPS region and because there are many campuses in the area, we are looking forward to a large and lively meeting. David Ernst of Vanderbilt will serve as program chair and would welcome suggestions and volunteers to organize sessions.

As always, SESAPS meetings showcase physics efforts going on in the South. The meetings also are excellent opportunities for undergraduates and graduates to present their first papers. To meet, chat, and share problems and successes in a large family is a very Southern thing. The SESAPS meetings support the health and vigor of the Southeastern physics community.

Please put the dates on your calendar, remind your colleagues, and plan to bring your students. By the way, remind your colleagues to sign up online for membership in SESAPS; it costs nothing if you are already an APS member.

As the new Chair I wish to thank the outgoing Chair, Tom Clegg, for his many efforts and abundant organizational skill that kept SESAPS moving in the last year. In the midst of the normal operations he oversaw the movement of the SESAPS website to http://www.aps.org/units/sesaps/, as well as, with Dave Ernst, assembling the outstanding slate of candidates for the SESAPS Executive Board.

Thanks are also in order for the Physics Departments at Vanderbilt University and Fisk University for preparing and hosting a successful Fall 2007 meeting in Nashville. The local chairs, Dave Ernst and Steve Morgan, and their colleagues provided a pleasant and unusual venue as well as a memorable banquet at historic Jubilee Hall on the Fisk campus. They are to be congratulated for a collaboration which included a historically minority campus. I think this was a first for a SESAPS meeting, but a precedent that should be repeated in the future.

I welcome the new members of the Executive Board, elected recently from an excellent slate of candidates. The new Vice-Chair is Dr. Paul Cottle of Florida State University. The new Treasurer is Dr. John Shriner of Tennessee Tech University. Dr. Matthew Edwards of Alabama A&M University is the newly elected at-large member of the Executive Board.

The departing members of the Executive Board - Paul Avery (Past Chair, 4 years in Chair chain), Larry Cain (Treasurer, 16 years) and Victoria Green (at-large member, four years) – are to be thanked for their dedicated service on the Executive Committee and to SESAPS through their terms.

We invite and welcome your suggestions for other openings on the Executive Committee. Each fall we seek nominees for the position of Vice-Chair and for one at-large member.

Finally, the Section makes three annual awards for outstanding research, teaching and service to physics in the Southeast. There are many members who are outstanding in these areas and worthy of recognition. Please think about nominating a colleague for the Beams, Pegram or Slack Award. The deadline and information are found in this newsletter.

I look forward to working with you and for you and SESAPS this year. I hope to see hordes of you in Raleigh not only to celebrate the 75th meeting of an organization that has a rich history, but also to enjoy the activity and energy of physics in the Southeast.

Sincerely,

David Haase
Professor of Physics
North Carolina State University