The Society for Mathematical Biology is pleased to announce that this year's recipient of the Arthur T. Winfree prize is Prof. Leon Glass of McGill University. Awarded every two years to a scientist whose work has "led to significant new biological understanding affecting observation/experiments," this prize commemorates the creativity, imagination and intellectual breadth of Arthur T. Winfree.

Beginning with simple and brilliantly chosen experiments, Leon launched the study of chaos in biology. Among the applications he and his many collaborators and students pursued was the novel idea of "dynamical disease" and the better understanding of pathologies like Parkinson's disease and cardiac arrhythmias. His elegant work (with Michael Guevara and Alvin Shrier) on periodic stimulation of heart cells demonstrated and explained how the interaction of nonlinearities with oscillations create complex dynamics and chaos.

The book "From Clocks to Chaos," which he co-authored with Michael Mackey, was an instant classic that illuminated this difficult subject for a whole generation of mathematical biologists. His combination of imagination, experimental and mathematical insight, and ability to communicate fundamental principles has launched new fields of research and inspired researchers ranging from applied mathematicians to medical researchers.

The 2013 Annual Meeting and association research and education conference for The Society for Mathematical Biology will be held in Tempe, Arizona from June 10-13, 2013. The conference theme is physiology, disease, ecology, and sustainability and is being hosted by the School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences and the Mathematical, Computational & Modeling Sciences Center within the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University. The conference will be held at the Tempe Mission Palms Hotel and Conference Center.

Meeting website: http://math.asu.edu/SMB2013.

The deadline for contributed talk abstracts is April 1, 2013.

Nominations are requested for the Akira Okubo Prize, which, for 2014, will be awarded to a living senior scientist whose lifetime achievements have been exemplary in developing innovative theory, in establishing superb conceptual ideas, in solving difficult theoretical problems, and/or in uniting theory and data to advance a biological subject. The areas of research are mathematical biology, bio-mathematics, theoretical biology, and biological oceanography. The prize is jointly awarded by the Society for Mathematical Biology (SMB) and the Japanese Society for Mathematical Biology (JSMB). The SMB and JSMB will invite the prize winner to deliver a lecture at the next joint annual meeting of JSMB and SMB, which will be held in Osaka (Japan) between July 28 and August 1, 2014.

For detailed information on the nomination process, please see http://smb.org/prizes/okubo_call.shtml.

For further infomation on the prize and previous winners, please see http://www.smb.org/prizes/index.shtml and http://www.smb.org/prizes/okubo.shtml.

The membership dues for 2013 are now due. As part of the continuing effort to make the Society for Mathematical Biology more efficient, we have changed the membership database server. It is now fully integrated into our website. All membership data has been migrated. To activate your account, update your profile and pay your membership dues, you need to create/reset your password. To do so, please visit the Member profile page (which is linked under the Membership tab) and click "Forgot Password". This will send you an automatically generated email with a link to login. If you did not provide an email, have changed email since, or can't remember what email address you used, you can either just opt to sign up as a new member or contact us (onlinemembership@smb.org) for other options.

Please let us know if you have any troubles by sending an email to onlinemembership@smb.org.

IMPORTANT: If you have bookmarked the previous online membership renewal website, please update your link. All membership renewals for 2013 that have already been processed through the previous system were migrated and recorded in the new embedded system.