Members of the Acoustical Society of America recently elected William Kuperman as their president-elect. Kuperman, who took office in May, will become president in 2004, succeeding Ilene Busch-Vishniac, ASA’s current president (see Physics Today, October 2002, page 67).
Kuperman received a BS in physics at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in New York City in 1965 and an MS in physics at the University of Chicago in 1966. A year later, he joined the Naval Research Laboratory as a research physicist, spending the next nine years there. During that time he earned his PhD in physics at the University of Maryland, College Park. Kuperman then moved to NATO’s SACLANT Undersea Research Centre in La Spezia, Italy, where he headed the acoustic modeling group between 1976 and 1981. He subsequently returned to the US, where he resumed working at NRL. In 1984, NRL named Kuperman senior scientist of its acoustics division. He joined the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 1993 and currently directs its marine physical laboratory.
“Right now, acoustics is in the midst of a broad, interdisciplinary renaissance concerned with a multitude of research areas in physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, psychology, and many engineering sciences,” says Kuperman. “My main goals involve capitalizing on our members’ accomplishments in order to provide more opportunities for interchange of ideas within the society as well as increased outreach to the broader community. Both on a national and international level, we must find a way to be even more inclusive and provide opportunities for potential members.”
To pursue these goals, he adds, “We must maintain a financially sound operation, which suggests that we perform a serious cost–benefit study and truly evaluate and inform the membership of some of our lesser known, long running, but expensive activities.” And in response to the growing number of smaller, specialized meetings, Kuperman says he would like to “address possibilities of making our meetings more intimate while at the same time maintaining their size and scope. I will support our editor in the goal of processing papers more efficiently and in dealing with the general challenges of electronic publishing.”
In other ASA election results, Mark F. Hamilton (University of Texas at Austin) took office as the society’s vice president-elect. Mardi C. Hastings (Office of Naval Research in Arlington, Virginia) and George Frisk (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Massachusetts) were each elected to a three-year term on the ASA executive council.
