Hello Members! The big news on membership is that we have broken the 1,000 members milestone!! We also had a record breaking 271 new members by the Early Bird meeting registration deadline (208 of whom are students). For reference, our previous record was ~239 new members in all of 2020. Please join me in welcoming our new members and remember to take advantage of the Membership Directory to find members for research collaborations, speaking engagements, recruitment opportunities, and more.

With all these new members, I want to thank the over 260 members who served as their sponsors and their first introductions to ASB membership. As a refresher, the purpose of sponsorship is to vouch that the individual has a demonstrated interest in biomechanics.  The system we currently use has been in place since the 2015 membership year and requests that new members submit the names and membership numbers of two sponsors who must be current ASB members. The intention with this system was both to involve current members in ASB membership review, and to encourage new members to reach out to biomechanists in their community to expand their network.

We had numerous requests from individuals needing help finding sponsors, and I am grateful to the New Application Sub-Committee of the Membership Committee (Saikat Pal, JJ Wallace, Henry Wang, and Feng Yang) for assisting me with finding sponsors or serving as sponsors themselves for these new members. While we do try to connect individuals with other ASB members in similar fields or in their geographical area (often using the very handy membership directory to find these members), we recognize that this current system in itself can be a barrier to entry for some. Thus, the New Application Sub-committee is looking into ways to streamline this process for 2024 membership. More details to come!

Following up from my last newsletter, thank you to the 238 members who took time to fill out the Disciplinary Category questionnaire! Another Membership Committee sub-committee including Jean McCrory, Ke Song, and Noah Rosenblatt are doing great work analyzing the questionnaire results and providing suggestions to revise the current Disciplinary Categories.

The Membership Committee is also working on improving ASB member recruitment & retention. We launched a #ASBAllYear Twitter campaign to remind everyone of the many benefits of ASB membership (beyond discounted annual meeting registration rates). These Membership Committee members are building collaborations with other societies, developing recruitment materials, and reviewing our strategic goals to enhance member engagement within the ASB. Thanks to Tarang Jain, Lisa MacFadden, Maria Pasquale, Shima Jalalian, Tim Burkhart, Michael Harris, Sarah Roelker, Ben Binder-Markey, and Brooke Slavens for their service on these sub-committees!

The engagement of members in this Society is outstanding. We consistently have well over 100 members volunteer for our various committees. And this year we had ~50% response rate on elections (447 votes)! (Many societies are happy to hit 20%.)

I look forward to seeing many new and familiar faces in Knoxville soon!