On behalf of the International Society for Porous Media family, I am wishing you a Happy Holiday season and a New Year. It has been a privilege and an honor to serve as the President of our society. Because of your loyalty and the hard work of our staff and various committees and their leadership, we had a very successful year in all respects. We have expanded our membership through increasing the institutional membership to 51, and establishing new national chapters; we now have 15 national chapters across four continents. We were able to attract two outstanding candidates for the president-elect position and we elected our first female President.

Thanks to the hard work of local organizing, events and program committees, we had a very successful annual meeting in Rotterdam with about 740 participants and around 940 abstracts. The local organizing committee for InterPore2018 is working hard with the events and program committees for our 2018 annual meeting in New Orleans, USA during which we will also celebrate our Jubilee. All signs are that this will be our largest annual meeting; we have had close to 1000 abstracts submitted.

We selected our inaugural InterPore Kimberly Clark Distinguished Lecturer who will be delivering the lecture at a number of places around the world. This will give very positive publicity to InterPore and the work we do that represent the diversity of disciplines. It is still possible to apply for hosting K-C Distinguished Lecturer during 2018.

As President, I’d like to offer my heartfelt thanks to all of you for your continuous commitment to our Society and those on numerous InterPore committees for fulfilling their varied tasks diligently while meeting their other professional and family obligations. We on the Executive Committee understand this is a laborious and time-consuming process and are most appreciative of your continued efforts on behalf of our society, to make it grow and to impact the porous media science and technology.

Have a wonderful Holiday Season. Looking forward to see many of you in New Orleans!

On behalf of the Executive Committee,

Tissa Illangasekare,
President, International Society for Porous Media