What Should We Look for in Candidates for HFES Offices?

About 25% of all HFES members are academic, and about 20% are outside the United States. However, among the current HFES leadership, academic members predominate, and there is no one from outside the United States in any Society-wide lead-ership role, even committees. We tend to nominate academic members because they publish, which makes them visible. They also tend to volunteer more often for Society roles because those roles more positively contribute to their retention, promo-tion, and salary than is the case for practitioners. If we want HFES to better represent practitioners and to be global, then those folks need to be on committees and elected to office.

Finding candidates outside the United States is particularly difficult, but members who come to the Annual Meeting when Council meets could be considered as candidates. Most routine HFES activities are done by phone and e-mail. In the future, an increasing percentage of our members will be from outside the United States as HFES becomes more widely perceived as a so-ciety run not just by Americans (and therefore, by implication, for Americans).
Thus, we need to realign our leadership to better reflect our membership, but we should do so in a way that does not devalue the important contributions of academic and U.S. members.