ARP 2015 Program Committee Notes: St. Louis
Jennifer Tackett
Northwestern University
The fourth biennial stand-alone meeting of ARP took place in St. Louis, MO, June 11th-13th. By all accounts, it was a roaring success. This was due in no small part to the many and continuous efforts of the program committee: Marc Fournier (co-chair), Jon Adler, Wiebke Bleidorn, Robin Edelstein, and Fred Oswald. Wiebke and Fred win MVP awards for going above-and-beyond in the field. Special thanks also to Simine Vazire and Josh Jackson, who facilitated local host coordination with various program issues. Another BIG thanks is owed to Chad Rummel at SPSP, who was an enormous help in facilitating shared use of their web portal for submissions this year.
The meeting started off incredibly well even before the meeting took place. We received an overwhelming number of excellent submissions. We also unveiled triple track sessions throughout the conference to better accommodate the wonderful submissions we receive - but even with these additional degrees of freedom, it still wasn't enough to hold everything we would have liked to have in the program. Two other aspects of submissions were also notable: we received 28 applicants for the Rising Stars symposium and 43 applicants for the Data Blitz. Although it made final decisions very difficult for those members of the program committee who evaluated them, it was inspiring to see such active participation and interest from the earliest career members of our organization. I hope we can continue this streak, and encourage our excellent graduate students and postdocs to keep considering these mechanisms to showcase their own work (and add lines to their CVs). It is a sign of a growing and thriving community to have such great investment from our most junior members.
The conference was very well supported this year, with 254 registered attendees, a substantial increase from our previous meeting. The program was packed with symposia and posters spanning all aspects of personality psychology. We also had several special features: the presidential symposium, organized by Dan Ozer, the Rising Stars symposium, the Data Blitz, a featured symposium organized by the European Association of Personality Psychologists, and several awards talks by the Tanaka and Murray award winner. The success of these coordinated efforts position them as likely recurring events (if they weren't already), so keep your eye out for all of these features at our next meeting.
Overall, it was a wonderful year for ARP and that was really showcased in all the amazing contributions everyone made to our meeting. Please continue supporting our meetings by submitting your great symposia and posters to Sacramento!