July 2, 2025 Heavy Lifters Meeting
The MEMS-TC organized a Heavy Lifters Lunch Meeting during the Transducers 2025 conference on Wednesday, July 2, as well as an informal dinner at a Capital Grille restaurant near the Conference venue the day before. The meeting on Wednesday provided an update on our efforts to transition from a Technical Community to a Society within the IEEE governing structure. In the past several months, the Transition Preparation Team has written the necessary society formation documents (Constitution and Bylaws) and has begun the Transition process outlined in the Technical Activities Board (TAB) Ops Manual. This transition included a webinar and an on-site presentation, both carried by our President, Prof. Clark Nguyen, and the vote of our future Society’s Field of Interest (FOI) by the IEEE Society and Council (S/C) Presidents gathered at the TAB President’s Forum celebrated on June 27. The result of their vote was against our proposed FOI by a close margin: 18 votes in favor, 19 votes against, and 2 abstentions. During the Heavy Lifters meeting, the attendees exposed and discussed different initiatives that, in their opinion, could turn the tide moving forward and obtain the favorable vote from a majority of IEEE S/C Presidents.
June 20, 2025 Mentorship Lunch
With financial support from MEMS-TC, Transducers 2025 offered a Mentorship Lunch for up to 200 participants (i.e., mentees and mentors) on Monday June 30th, from 12:15 to 14:00. To help organized an effective mentorship event that consists of a group of mentors and mentees from across the globe that could interact on topics of great mutual interest, the prospective participants were asked to complete a survey.
Mentors were selected based on the following criteria:
- Participation Level (can mentors engage for most or all of the event)
- Global Distribution (mentors are needed from all three regions)
- Mentor Topics (overlap with topics requested by mentees)
- Promptness of Response (mentor slots will get filled so do not wait)
Mentees were selected based on the following criteria:
- Participation Level (can mentees engage for most or all of the event)
- Global Distribution (mentees must come from all three regions)
- Mentee Topics (overlap with topics provided by the mentors)
- Promptness of Response (mentee slots will get filled so do not wait)
The mentors had to be willing to serve as a mentor to many of the students, postdocs, and junior faculty/engineers in the community, and the mentees had to be willing to engage with the senior members of the community that were willing to serve as mentors and give mentees access to their vast experience, knowledge, and professional network.
MEMS-TC Exhibitors Booth
To inform conference attendees of our mission and activities, we also had an exhibitors booth with promotional items that were popular among students, industry folks, and academic visitors (e.g., coffee mugs, T-shirts, and pins). To host the booth, we received support from several PhD students from Northeastern University (Luca Spagnuolo and Walter Gubinelli), University of Texas, Austin (Mihir S Chaudhari and Hanson Yao), University of Florida (Yang Zhang and Yunong Wang), and University of Southern California (Max Li and Nikolas Barrera) who rotated in groups of two during poster breaks. During our time in the conference, we continued recruiting a healthy number of new members that, independently of their membership status with IEEE and other Technical Societies, were interested in our community and wanted to receive periodical updates.
