As I write this column for the March issue of the BPS Bulletin, the Annual Meeting in Los Angeles is a few weeks away. I am, as always, looking forward to learning great science and to making and renewing connections with the BPS community at the meeting. This time, I am also amazed and honored to have the opportunity to serve as your BPS president for the coming year. As I ponder the challenges and opportunities ahead, I realize that one of the strengths of the Biophysical Society that I value most is the way that BPS embraces and celebrates many forms of diversity.
BPS differs from many other scientific societies in being intentionally international and interdisciplinary. Although the first meeting in 1957 was called the “First National Biophysics Conference,” the organizers chose the name “Biophysical Society,” and two years later established its official publication, Biophysical Journal. BPS currently has 29% international members and actively promotes international representation on its Council, on editorial boards, and in the selection of speakers and awardees. For example, the 2025 Annual Meeting Symposia and Workshops feature approximately 61% of speakers from the United States and 39% international speakers. The interdisciplinary nature of BPS crosses boundaries between biology, chemistry, physics, and more, which makes us nimble enough to welcome emerging subfields and techniques to our membership and our meetings. Such diversity in science is important for addressing hard problems, and by collaborating across disciplines and international borders we increase innovation.
BPS feels like a natural scientific home for many of us who tackle challenging systems like membrane proteins and complexes that benefit from combining multiple approaches to address the key mechanistic questions. BPS has also always prominently featured scientists employing computational approaches. This is a major strength that positions all of us to individually or collaboratively take full advantage of opportunities to integrate emerging computational advances into our science. The diversity of our scientific approaches not only improves our ability to tackle hard problems, it also makes our conferences and interactions with the BPS community wonderfully stimulating. The size of our annual meetings (recently averaging ~4,700 attendees) is fabulous for fostering a diverse, interactive community that actively seeks to learn about new areas and avoids the silos that emerge at larger meetings. In addition, BPS’s Thematic Meetings provide an excellent complement to the Annual Meeting, as these small, member-initiated conferences have been held, since their inception in 2010, outside the United States in 20 different countries.
BPS has a longstanding commitment to promote inclusion of diverse groups. Since joining BPS as a graduate student in the 1980s, I have felt very fortunate that my natural scientific home also increasingly felt like a community that welcomed women scientists. The numbers support this feeling: BPS Council reached ~50% women in 2012, and the most recent four Annual Meetings have averaged ~51% women speakers. Even with these numbers, the Society appropriately recognized the need to address the pervasive issue of sexual harassment, which was the focus of the President’s Symposium in 2020. A Council-appointed Task Force updated the BPS Code of Conduct that same year and also developed our Ethics Guidelines and an Awards and Fellows Revocation Policy in 2021.
BPS efforts to raise the participation and visibility of scientists from historically underrepresented groups include our Black in Biophysics Symposium, which was the President’s Symposium in 2023 and 2024 until Council voted to make it a regular annual symposium for 2025 and beyond. SympSelect and Workshop Select talks, introduced at the 2024 Annual Meeting, provide the opportunity to identify and feature additional scientists beyond those already known to the Program Committee and Council. Finally, we have been seeking to increase participation by industry scientists and have worked to ensure members from industry serve on Council and BPS committees and are featured in sessions at the Annual Meeting and in various webinars throughout the year. This longstanding and ongoing commitment to diversity enables BPS to recruit and promote the best possible talent and a wide range of perspectives to do excellent science.
The diversity of BPS also positions us to address the critical societal challenges of our time. Having our meeting in Los Angeles reminds us of the many challenges of climate change, which brings with it ever more frequent and more intense natural disasters, including wildfires, hurricanes, and floods. At the meeting we will again all marvel at the rapid pace of science, which has profound life-saving consequences, such as the COVID vaccines that saved countless lives. And yet we are faced with a growing distrust of science and of expertise, more generally. The BPS Annual Meeting will also feature some of our many intentional and successful efforts to promote inclusion of the best talent from all groups, such as the Black in Biophysics Symposium discussed above and the JUST-B poster session. But in our larger society there is significant pushback against this work.
How does our diversity help us address such challenges? Serving on our newest BPS committee, the Committee on Sustainability, I have seen the tremendous benefit of having international members, with perspectives that include a wide range of policies on climate change. We organized the 2025 President’s Symposium “Biophysics for a Sustainable Future” with the dual goals of inspiring biophysicists to pursue research in sustainability and to incorporate sustainable practices into their research. Funding mechanisms for such research will be discussed in this Symposium and in the “Sustainability in Scientific Research” session co-hosted by the Public Affairs Committee and the Committee on Sustainability.
As a diverse community of individuals who pursue rigorous science with a wide range of approaches, BPS members recognize that clear communication is vital to interdisciplinary work. Our diverse perspectives and communication skills should enable us to add our voices to the critical task of communicating the value of science to the broader public, and thus help to address the current distrust in science.
Finally, with our longstanding commitment to fostering a diverse community, BPS as a whole and BPS members individually know first-hand the benefits of such an interactive and welcoming community. We should take every opportunity to demonstrate and communicate those benefits to those who devalue these efforts.
I am proud to be a member of our vibrant, diverse, and talented BPS community, and honored to have the opportunity to lead BPS in the coming year. I value both the continuity of our great programs and the opportunity to implement new ideas to improve BPS. As president, I will work to promote the success of our members and the value of our science, and I welcome your feedback and input regarding BPS activities ([email protected]). My hope is that together we will continue the good work of BPS in support of our members so that we can all contribute even more effectively to advance science and address societal challenges.
—Lynmarie K. Thompson, President