The Israel Chemist and Chemical Engineer Issue 8 · November 2021 · Kislev 5782 5 Letter from President of ICS Dear Colleagues, Although the Covid-19 pandemic with its consequences will continue affecting every aspect of our life, it seems that we have crossed the worst phase, and have gradually resumed all the professional and personal activities of pre-Covid times. We had to skip the 2021 Meeting, but we kept our traditional award ceremony and held it at the Open University campus on July 1, 2021 (see my report in this issue). The 86th ICS Annual Meeting, initially scheduled for February 2021, will take place on February 22-23, 2022. I expect high attendance because many ICS members and students are eager to meet physically rather than virtually, resume beneficial networking, and exchange their ideas and recent discoveries. Profs. Charles Diesendruck and Saar Rahav of the Technion’s Schulich Faculty of Chemistry will chair the meeting. I look forward to seeing many of you at this gathering. The establishment of the ACS Chapter in Israel marks a significant advance for our Society. On November 18, 2021, we celebrated the Chapter’s inauguration at the Open University campus in Ra’anana. Many ACS members attended the event with their spouses. They participated in an informal discussion on the Chapter’s goals and plans, such as ICS– ACS joint membership, research funding opportunities, ACS–ICS joint symposia at the ACS National Meetings, binational collaboration, and exchange programs of scientists, graduate students, and even high-school pupils. We also discussed the preparations for the elections of the Chapter’s officers - President, Secretary-General, and Treasurer. In my introductory comments, I explained that the ACS is the largest and most influential chemical society worldwide. Founded in 1876 (just 57 years before the establishment of the ICS), the ACS has become a truly international organization with 20% of its 155,000 members residing outside the USA. The 25 international chapters add to a remarkable array of 33 technical divisions and 186 local sections. At the end of the evening, Prof. Dan Shechtman of the Technion, who received the 1999 Wolf Prize in Physics, and the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering quasiperiodic crystals, lectured on “American and Israeli Wolf Prize Laureates, and their scientific achievements.” As youmay know, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) has recently elected me to become the Union’s 41st President. It is the second time in the 103-year history of IUPAC that the Union has an Israeli President. The first was Prof. Joshua Jortner, who served as the 28th President (1998-1999). I feel honored to continue his legacy. My service as Editor-in-Chief of the Israel Journal of Chemistry (IJC), the ICS’s Official Journal, continues to be a source of great satisfaction. The newly released Impact Factor (IF) for 2020-2021 is 3.333, representing a 43.7% increase from last year. Even more impressive is the IJC Total Citations of 3520, representing a 28.40% increase from last year. It is remarkable that within just one decade since we started our collaboration with Wiley-VCH, the IF increased from 0.380 to 3.333, and citations went up from 883 to 3520. The credit for these achievements goes to many of you who served as Guest Editors of topical issues or contributed highly cited articles. Please get in touch with me directly for any new ideas concerning future topics that deserve to be highlighted by our journal. Finally, I am delighted to see this ICE magazine developing under Editor-in-Chief, Prof. Arlene Wi lson-Gordon. I encourage you to contribute an article to the ICE on any topic you like, including popular science, history of science, report on an event, opinions, etc. Please, don’t hesitate to contact Arlene or me on these matters. Enjoy your reading, Ehud Keinan President, the Israel Chemical Society
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