This Next Year in HFES

Goals for the Year
Goal 1: Adjust the balance between academics and practitioners to better represent all our members. In our most recent strategic planning day, the Executive Council spent a great deal of time discussing the idea of supporting practitioners. HFES is a science-based society, so academic input to what we do is and will always be important. However, academia is over represented in the
senior leadership. To adjust the balance, I have spent extra time finding appointees who have the desired experience, zest, and time; provided a diversity
of background (e.g., cognitive vs. physical ergonomics) across committees; and are practitioners as well.

Of the folks appointed so far, all but one are practitioners. The temptation is to focus on one’s immediate circle in making appointments, which for me would be University of Michigan alumni and folks conducting driving research, and that
would be inconsistent with representing all members.

Goal 2: Determine in what ways becoming a global society is appropriate (and take the necessary steps as a consequence). Waldemar Karwowski, the president two terms back (“the previous, previous president”), described the vision of HFES becoming a global society. In some sense, we are global because we have
members from all over the world and chapters outside the United States. But we are U.S.-centric.