Happy New Year! I wish you, your family and your friends a very healthy and happy 2017.

It as an honor to be elected the Chairperson of the IEEE Long Island Section for 2017. I am delighted to be joined by Louis D’Onofrio as the First Vice Chair, James Colloti as the Second Vice Chair, Alberto DeLeon as the Secretary, and Santo Mazzola as the Treasurer. Together as a team, we are privileged to have the guidance of effective leaders such as Nazrul Islam, John Vodopia, and John Schmidt, as past chairs.

I would like to take the opportunity to thank all the members of the Section for your support in electing the new Committee and helping the Section to operate smoothly.

The Long Island Section is one of the most active bodies in the IEEE worldwide, having a significant number of society chapters, affinity groups and committees. Our mission will be to continue the current activities and also to expand the Section in terms of outreach via our newly designed website and social media. I believe strong and effective outreach will help with memberships development and, chapters, accomplishments that are major efforts that were started by my predecessors. We will continue to address the two major challenges that we began addressing last year. We will use the experience from last year move these goals along.

The key challenge is to effectively synergize the membership development efforts with other section’s activities and promote them via social media. As such, I will be creating new roles, and committees to accomplish that. We will solicit qualified volunteers to assist with the new objectives.  I have begun assisting societies with organizing more technical meetings, inviting distinguished lecturers. I plan to continue with these efforts in a more systemic way through all our conferences and sponsored activities.

The Executive Committee cannot function properly without your support and participation of good volunteers. I request that you each consider getting involved in the technical and social activities of the Section. This could mean simply communicating your ideas to us. Ideas that will help us be of more service to the profession and local professionals such as you.

Please visit our website at ieee.li for information about the officers, activities, chapters and calendar of events. Please feel free to send me your concerns and suggestions at chair@ieee.li.

The new Executive Committee has already started working on a plan for a number of activities this year. The first major event will be the Awards Banquet, which is scheduled for March 29, 2017, at Fox Hollow. Please join us to recognize the contribution of our distinguished members and volunteers. The Long Island Systems, Applications, and Technology (LISAT) conference is scheduled for May 5, which is expected to attract both academic researchers and industry experts to exchange research and development of technology. The section is co-sponsoring the International Energy and Sustainability Conference (IESC), which is scheduled for October 20.

Last year for the first time, our computer society got involved and sponsored a scientific conference along with Brookhaven National Laboratories, Stony Brook University, and NYU-Poly. We plan to be involved again this year and hope for more participation from our section. In addition, the Section is planning to offer a couple of workshops on different state-of-the-art technologies to the members as well as non-members.

Looking forward to having an effective year in the Section with all of your participation and support.

 

Respectfully submitted,

Marjaneh Issapour MSEE, P.E.

Chair

IEEE Long Island Section