The Biochemistry department at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, where I did my graduate training 1985-1990, was a faculty of white men like most biochemistry departments then and some even now. Around my third year, my department hired crystallographer Dr. Marcia Newcomer. A woman! She had kids! She was married! She drove a fast car! And I had the revolutionary thought that I (someone who wanted kids, liked the idea of marriage, and wanted a fast car) could do science while female too!

Fast forward a few, umm, decades, to #BPS19. Here we are! Women doing science! And not just any science, but science in physics, a field with a history of being, let's just say "unwelcoming" to women. After doing electron microscopy and other biophysical approaches over those decades, I finally joined the Biophysical Society a couple of years ago wanting to learn the latest and greatest techniques while hanging out with like-minded colleagues. I wish I had joined years ago!

I am delighted by the high quality of the BPS Bulletin and the content on the website. I love the dedication to education and to trainees. And the seeming nonchalance regarding the extraordinary fact that women equally lead, talk, and discover in the Biophysical Society. As my first annual meeting in the Society, #BPS19 has been fantastic! My only complaint is having to miss talks that overlapped with other talks or my own talk. Well, okay that and maybe the snow was not so great for me in my Houston weather appropriate coat. And the fact that I lost my glasses for about a day and couldn't see my computer screen or the projector screen or friends waving until they were close...

I look around the room at each talk I've attended this week. I see diversity and inclusion as the norm! People from all over the world have gathered to talk about biophysics. Some are into a particular method. Our fabulous keynote speaker, Dame Carol V. Robinson, for example, fell in love with a machine at age 16 and has tinkered with that machine her entire career. Others, like me, are into a particular problem (what is the structural explanation of supercoiling-induced DNA activation?) and will employ the best methods (often biophysical) to address that problem. The talks have reflected this comfortable division of "method centric" and "project centric."

Overwhelmingly, everyone I've talked to about it has also expressed that they felt included and valued–a beautiful and rare thing! I'm proud to be a member of this society and look forward to BPS for years to come!