In February, I had the pleasure of attending the Annual Meetings of TMS in San Francisco and SME in Denver. Both meetings were extremely successful and I appreciated the opportunity to meet with the leadership of those societies and present AIME awards to their members. During both meetings, I was able to discuss the AIME progress on strategic initiatives and I particularly enjoyed learning from these organizations their important new directions and goals. AIME will keep in close contact with TMS on its Materials and Society initiative and with SME on its Carbon Management work. AIME is also pursuing opportunities for membership involvement in important thrusts by offering support towards joint engineering Society activities including the Carbon Management working group, our Sustainability Workshop in Switzerland this July, and training of young leaders via the Emerging Leaders Alliance effort (see additional details below). If you have suggestions on how we can better support the Member Societies, please contact me at mkarmis@vt.edu.

As we continue to push through challenging economic times, AIME, like many other organizations, is critically examining its budget and operational expenditures to ensure that it can effectively support core functions. In addition, we have streamlined our efforts to recognize outstanding leaders in the profession, through the conference of awards and supporting promising newcomers, via the granting of scholarships. I encourage you to submit award nominations by June 15 via online forms at http://www.aimehq.org/awards/awardlist.cfm. Scholarship applications must also be submitted online at http://www.aimehq.org/scholarships/scholarshipslist.cfm by June 15th.

AIME leadership continues to represent the organization and its Member Societies at important profession- and industry-wide functions such as NAE and AAES events, Engineers’ Week, and the Engineering R&D Symposium in April. Finally, as one of my last tasks as AIME President this year, I will be hosting the 2009 annual Board meeting August 6-8 in Alexandria, VA. We have allocated one day during the Annual Meeting in a workshop setting, allowing for updates and discussions between the AIME Board and representatives from our sister engineering Founder Societies, AAES, UEF, industry, government agencies and the new administration.

If you have questions or suggestions about this newsletter or any AIME activities, please contact Associate Executive Director, Michele Gottwald, at gottwald@aimehq.org or 303-948-4256.

Most Sincerely,

Michael Karmis
2008-2009 AIME President
SME Past President
Director, Virginia Center for Coal and Energy Research
Stonie Barker Professor, Department of Mining and Minerals Engineering
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

AIME confers 9 Major awards and funds 15 other awards each year. It currently gives away approximately $60,000 in scholarships annually. Nominations and applications are currently being accepted through June 15th for most of these. For more information or to submit online, please see http://www.aimehq.org/awards/awardlist.cfm or http://www.aimehq.org/scholarships/scholarshipslist.cfm.

AIChE (chemical engineering society) is heading up a cross-disciplinary group working on ways to jointly influence education and decision-making related to carbon emissions measurement, control, and reduction. The technical team of experts is meeting at a biofuels conference in Tampa, FL on April 29 and with leadership of the Societies on April 30 to update them on work to date and develop a plan for moving forward. Members of the AIME Carbon Management Committee will be attending. For more information, please visit the team’s website at http://www.aiche.org/FSCarbonMgmt/.

AIME is leading a cross-disciplinary team planning a sustainability workshop to discuss how engineering can best help address societal challenges in the areas of energy, recycling, transportation, housing, food and water, and health. Attendance at the event, July 22-24, 2009, at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland is limited and corporate sponsorship is available. To register or obtain additional information, visit http://www.spe.org/events/aime/

TMS is leading a joint effort for AIME, its Member Societies, and the other engineering Founder Societies (AIChE, ASCE, ASME, and IEEE) to deliver world-class leadership training and an online community for emerging leaders in our professions. The project is supported by a grant from the United Engineering Foundation. The first event, held October 9-11, 2008 in Pittsburgh, PA, was a resounding success. This year includes development of on-line training to accompany a capstone course October 8-10, 2009 in Reston, VA. For more information, please visit the program's website, www.emergingleadersalliance.org or send an email to ela@tms.org.

AIME has added to its 247 volumes of Transactions from 1871-1970 by digitizing an additional 170 important works (available as searchable Adobe PDF files). Online access to these documents is free to members of the AIME Societies via the Members Only section of your Society’s website. The content has also been uploaded to SME’s online repository, www.onemine.org. For more information, see http://www.aimehq.org/library.cfm.

April 20-21, 2009	NAE Convocation, AAES Awards & Board Meeting, & Engineering R&D Symposium	Washington, D.C.
April 30, 2009	Presidents and Executive Directors Carbon Management Workshop	Tampa, FL
May 4-7, 2009	Offshore Technology Conference	Houston, TX
May 4-7, 2009	AIST Annual Meeting	St. Louis, MO
May 20, 2009	Engineering Founder Society Executive Directors	New York, NY
May 22, 2009	AAES Engineers Forum for Sustainability and International Activities Committee Meetings	Washington, D.C.
July 22-24, 2009	Engineering Solutions for Sustainability: Materials and Resources	EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland
August 5-7, 2009	The 2009 IEEE Conference on the History of Technical Societies	Philadelphia, PA
August 6-8, 2009	AIME Annual Board Meeting	Alexandria, VA
August 9-13, 2009	1st International Conference on Sustainability Science and Engineering	Cincinnati, OH
Fall 2009	Founder Society Presidents & Executive Directors	Washington, D.C.
October 4-7, 2009	SPE Annual Meeting	New Orleans, LA
October 8-10, 2009	Emerging Leaders Alliance Capstone	Washington, D.C.