The inaugural meeting of the AAPG Charles Taylor Fellowship, featuring a keynote address by 2012 Pratt Award winner Robert H. Lander, will be held Feb. 4 at Rice University in Houston.
The gathering, which provides an opportunity for face-to-face interaction among the group’s members, features a special dinner as a way to thank current and past members of the AAPG editorial board for their service.
Lander’s talk will be titled “The Message Is the Medium: Reconciling Petrology and Rock Physics Models.”
The Charles Taylor Fellowship was established last year by the AAPG Executive Committee as a way to help ensure that the BULLETIN remains the premier scientific journal of energy geoscience. It is a “special committee” that will be chaired by the AAPG Elected Editor, who currently is Stephen E. Laubach.
The group comprises all former and current members of the Association’s editorial boards. Initial priorities for the group have included improving editorial board operations, identifying suitable board and reviewer performance metrics and standards, monitoring of BULLETIN performance (including time-to-decision and other efficiency measures) and updating our reviewer database.
The Fellowship also takes an active role in identifying and soliciting topics for theme issues and may recommend review articles to be commissioned.
More than 300 people have been invited to the February dinner meeting.
Plans for the day call for several working sessions that deal with:
- Improvements to the BULLETIN editorial process.
- Selection of publication awards.
- Development of a short course for aspiring young authors.
“The Fellowship also is a way for AAPG to say ‘thank you’ to the more than 280 living former associate editors who have given their time and energy to the BULLETIN over the past several decades,” Laubach said.
Charles Henry Taylor was AAPG’s first editor, serving from 1917-19, and he was hailed as being a key figure in AAPG history.
His 1964 obituary called him the “father of AAPG.”
Lander, who will speak during the dinner portion of the schedule, is with Geocosm in Durango, Colo. He and co-author Linda M. Bonnell received the Wallace E. Pratt Memorial Award – presented to honor and reward the authors of the best AAPG BULLETIN article in each calendar year – for the paper “A Model for Fibrous Illite Nucleation and Growth in Sandstones,” which appeared in the August 2010 BULLETIN.
Fellowship members can attend the working sessions and dinner free of charge; a limited number of tickets to the dinner and Lander’s talk will be available to the public on a first-come, first-served basis.
To request tickets, or for more information on the meeting, contact Tonia Greening.