Newsletter History

presented at the 25th International EPR Symposium, Denver July 30, 2002

Rebecca (Becky) Gallivan is honoured by the Society with a Gold Special Medal for Distinguished Service for her outstanding support of the EPR community since 1990 through maintaining the IES Office at the University of Illinois. Becky, a Senior Administrator in the Illinois EPR Research Center, has, more than anyone else, kept the Society going. Her contribution, much of it “out of hours” and well beyond the call of duty, must not go unrecognised at this time as her involvement is being wound back. She is a fount of knowledge about the Society that will not easily be replaced . She has maintained our member database throughout, responded to email and other communications with admirable professionalism. Her involvement with the Society will be sadly missed but it will be a mark of her contribution that the Society has reached a stage of maturity when these tasks can, and must, now be undertaken by others. The Society says “thank you” in the form of this special gold medal and with a thank-you gift check.

“Sixteen years ago, when I started this effort, there was no vehicle like this newsletter to provide the international EPR community with a common medium for news and exchange of information. As we started the Illinois EPR Research Center (IERC) here, we saw a need for such a bulletin and decided to undertake it as a service. What we had in mind was very modest – just a few photocopied sheets that would come out once a year or so, and I undertook to start it as an ‘Electron Spin Resonance Centers Newsletter’. But the EPR community of several thousand scientists around the world also had no international organization, and Hal Swartz, then director o f the IERC, made a strong case to many of our colleagues from several countries to start one. So the International EPR (ESR) Society was born, with the fledgling Centers newsletter to serve as our Society publication. Soon, under its new name ‘EPR Newsletter’, this little pamphlet grew to a substantial and time-consuming professional publication with announcements and reports on both local and international conferences, news items, want ads, and equipment exchange section, information on experimental techniques, computer programs and methods, exchanges of opinion through letters to the editor, guest columns, sponsors’ ads, a lot of news about the International EPR Society, and an extensive annual directory of members and other EPR scientists. This has been a very major effort, not only on my part, but also that ot our former IERC secretary, Martha Moore, and especially of Becky Gallivan, whose organizational skills, dedication, and hard work as Assistant Editor made my editorship job possible. I thank them profusely. To our many colleagues around the world who provided material and helped in other ways, I am grateful. And I sincerely thank the IES for recognizing my starting and developing this Newsletter with a medal. I’m not sorry to lose all the effort, time, and attention that editing this Newsletter has required, but I will miss the many interactions with colleagues and the making of new acquaintances and friends that it has occasioned”

(Extract from Letter From the Editor, EPR newsletter, vol. 12, no.4, 2002)