Glenelg, South Australia
Tuesday, September 27, 2005

1. The minutes of the previous meeting held in Castelvecchio Pascloi (Tuscany) Italy were accepted.
There was a minor modification in the dates of the meeting for 2007 to be held in Sendai, Japan.
2. Vigorous applause greeted the organizers of the current committee for the fantastic job they have
done at the FNPS meeting, and also in the seamless integration with the Jeffrey S. Robinson
Symposium. Particular thanks were given to the convenor, Cathie Coulter, and the local organizing
committee: Julie Pitcher, Miles DeBlasio, Sanita Grover, Olivia Wyss, Amanda Sferruzzi-Perri, and
Natasha Campbell. Further applause was given to Mark Grover for his masterly handling of the
audio visual needs of the participants. In addition, the JSR symposium convenors, Kathy Gafford
and Julie Owens, were similarly applauded. Credit was given to the scientific committee for putting
together an extraordinarily high quality program.
3. The coordinator, Laura Bennet, pointed out that the website is up and actively running. She reported
little progress on the selection of a logo for the society.
She noted that abstracts for the two prior meetings were already on the website.
4. The board had discussed whether we wanted to have the abstracts published in an scientific journal.
The board did not believe this was desirable because the abstracts are archived in such a way it
could preclude subsequent presentations of a fuller account of the project. The same general sense
was present in the current annual general meeting.
5. Laura Bennet and Bill Parer have served for three years as coordinator and scribe, respectively.
According to the mission statement, the organizational coordinator serves for three years. The
board strongly recommended that Laura Bennet be appointed for a further term as chair. She has
graciously accepted, and the general meeting applauded this decision.
6. Changes in the Board Membership
The board suggested, and the annual general meeting agreed, that board members who have not
attended a meeting for three years will transition off the board.
New members include our first member from Asia, Tomoaki Ikeda from Osaka, Japan. Jan Nijuis
from Maastricht, The Netherlands, has also accepted a position on the board.
7. The Dawes Fund
The fate of the Dawes Fund is at this stage uncertain, because of incorporation into a departmental
fund. Negotiations regarding its salvage are ongoing. Meanwhile, future organizers should assume
that there will be little or no money coming from this fund.
The board recommended that one percent of future registration fees be devoted to a pool of money
in order to supply certain necessary expenses for the society, not the least of which is the expenses
of the website, currently being handled on a personal grant by the Coordinator. Funds from this
annual meeting pool would be placed in a non-taxable account, and could be added to by donations.
8. It was agreed that we should form an FNPS archive of the proceedings booklets for the past
meetings. It was also suggested that there should be several locations for sets of these. Bill Parer
has agreed to collect as many of the past proceedings as possible in North America. Further
suggestions were that Richard Harding will attempt the same in Australasia and Jan Nijhuis for
Europe.
9. The 2006 meeting is to be held in Cambridge, UK, from the 17th to the 20th of September, 2006.
The 2007 meeting will be held in Sendai, Japan from August 26th to 29th, 2007.
The 2008 meeting will be held in Maastricht, The Netherlands, from the 22nd until the 25th of June,
2008. This will be held in conjunction with a celebration for Jelte de Haan and Carlos Blanco, both
of whom will have retired by this time.
The agreement was that the meeting should return to the western hemisphere in 2009 and as noted
before, there have been informal discussions about holding it in either the U.S. or in South America.
10. The prize for ‘Best Oral Presentation’ and ‘Best Poster Presentation’ were decided after much
discussion by the members of the board. These are separate from the prizes awarded by the
Australia convenor for the best abstracts at the FNPS and JSR symposium.
The award for the ‘Best Oral Presentation’ was given to Nicolette Hodyl of The University of New
Castle, NSW, Australia, for her excellent presentation on the reduction of the ability of rat offspring
to respond appropriately to an immune challenge in early life following prenatal endotoxin exposure.
The prize for the ‘Best Poster Presentation’ was given to Hayley Dickinson of Monash University,
Melbourne, Australia for her presentation on the Spiney mouse, and her suggestion that this would
be a good model for perinatal research.
 

Respectfully submitted,
Julian T. Parer, MD, PhD
Scribe
FNPS
 

Home