The IEEE Radiation Effects Steering Group (RESG) held its annual fall business meeting in Phoenix, Arizona, at the site of our upcoming 2002 Nuclear and Space Radiation Effects Conference (NSREC).

This year's NSREC will be held in Phoenix on 15-19 July 2002. The RESG chose Phoenix for the 2002 Conference because of its family-friendly location and outstanding technical facilities. The main technical session, poster session, data workshop, and industrial exhibits all have excellent spaces. In addition, all guest rooms at this resort are two-room suites, so the underlying message is, "bring the family to Phoenix this year."

The Pointe South Mountain Resort has 7 swimming pools, including a huge WATER FUN PARK for the kids (to be completed before July), right on the grounds. The resort is located in the middle of a classic desert-style golf course and adjacent to the South Mountain Regional Park. The fitness center is the best that I've seen anywhere. Companions will have an opportunity to visit the world-famous Heard Museum. The Wednesday evening social will be a real Mexican rodeo and fiesta. It has been rumored that we may ask some Steering Group members to rope a calf or milk a goat. Any volunteers?

The Pointe South Mountain Resort is located directly across the street from Fry's Electronics Superstore. For those who have never visited Fry's, it is a úheavenly shopping experienceî for an electronic engineer. A few blocks down the street is a huge shopping mall, a úheavenly shopping experienceî for the rest of the family. Ken Hunt from the Vanderbilt University at Air Force Research Laboratory and his committee have done an outstanding job with this site. Jeff Black from Mission Research Corporation is heading the local arrangements committee.

Attendees at the 2002 NSREC in Phoenix will also have the opportunity to participate in a high-quality one-day short course on Monday, July 15. An added attraction for this year's course will be an updated version of the CD-ROM archive of Radiation Effects Short Course Notebooks. NSREC will provide a complimentary copy of this new CD to all those who register for the 2002 Short Course. Paul Dressendorfer of Sandia National Laboratories is the 2002 Short Course Chairman.

Looking to the future, next year's conference is scheduled for 21-25 July 2003 at the DoubleTree Hotel in Monterey, California. Allan Johnston of Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Conference General Chairman, has been working for over a year on the details for this meeting. Allan's committee is planning to observe the 40th Anniversary of the NSREC with a separate (new) special issue of the Transactions on Nuclear Science. The special issue will include 20-25 invited papers, from some of NSREC's most distinguished authors, summarizing the significant technical findings over the past 40 years. Joe Srour from TRW has agreed to be the lead editor for this special issue. Paul Dodd of Sandia National Laboratories has been selected as Conference Technical Chairman.

As you know, it takes more than three years to plan the details for each NSREC. Last year, Dan Fleetwood of Vanderbilt University was appointed as 2004 Conference General Chairman. Dan is currently looking at an East Coast location and has visited several sites. He is giving strong consideration to the city of Atlanta; however Boston, Orlando, and others are still on his radar screen. Dan will be negotiating contracts and forming his conference committee soon.

During the fall RESG meeting in Phoenix, Lew Cohn of Defense Threat Reduction Agency was selected as Associate Guest Editor for the December issue of the Transactions on Nuclear Science (TNS). The editor's job is a 3-year term. Lew will support Guest Editor Steve Witczak from Sandia National Laboratories and Assistant Guest Editor Jim Kinnison from Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in the huge task of organizing our peer review for the upcoming December issue.

We are moving the NSREC into the digital world with on-line copies of the Transactions on Nuclear Science, PowerPointü presentations at the conference, and electronic preprint rooms on the web site. What is next? RESG is currently investigating the issues associated with making a digital video of the Short Course that can be played directly on a PC or Mac computer. As an experiment at NSREC 2001, Tim Holman from Vanderbilt University recorded Ron Schrimpf's short course presentation for conversion to QuickTimeü video format. Tim compressed the 1.5 hour presentation to only 80 Mbytes in this format, proving that it's technically feasible to put an entire one-day short course on a single CD-ROM. The RESG viewed a copy of Tim's video CD during our fall business meeting. The quality was outstanding. RESG is thrilled with relative simplicity of superimposing video/voice images of authors and their PowerPointü slides on CD, and at the same time worried about the potential loss of revenue if some attendees decide to skip the live presentation or (worse yet) view another attendee's CD instead of coming to NSREC. RESG is trying to find ways to share more technical information, keep the NSREC registration fee as low as possible, and keep the conference budgets in black ink. It is a tough balancing act.

Please visit our NSREC web site at www.nsrec.com for the most up-to-date information, call for papers, on-line registration materials, award nomination forms, author/ reviewer schedules, author templates, digital copies of short course notebooks, attendee email addresses, conference committee contacts, list of RESG members, history of the NSREC, web links to our NSREC vendors, and more.

Dale Platteter serves as Chairman of the Radiation Effects Steering Group, which oversees the NSREC Conference. He is technical chair of the NPSS Radiation Effects Committee. Dale can be reached at NAVSEA Crane, Code 605, Building 3334, Crane, IN 47522; Phone +1 812 854-1206; Fax +1 812 854-1751, E-mail: platt@ieee.org