Instructions for Session Organizers -- PQE-2009

Dates:

First, please note the dates for PQE-2009 are Jan 4-8, 2009. The reception for the Lamb-medal winners will be in the evening on Sunday, January 4, 2009. The conference sessions will then be Monday, January 5 through Thursday, January 8.

Responsibility for invitations:

It is your responsibility to contact your invited speakers, and invite them to the meeting. You may do this in any manner you wish, but please give them the address of the PQE web site, and ask them to register their email address with us

Attendance:

The conference sessions run from early morning on Monday, January 5 through late evening on Thursday, January 8. Please encourage your invited speakers to attend as much of the conference as possible.

Session Structure:

Usually when you are invited to be a plenary speaker, you are expected to organize a session around your talk. That is, you will invite some speakers whose talks would follow yours in a break-out session. (The plenary talks are followed by 3-4 parallel sessions.) Plenary talks are 30 minutes, and invited talks are 20 minutes.

Sessions at PQE consist of either:

• 1 Plenary + 3 Invited talks
• 1 Plenary + 4 Invited talks

So, you see what kind of sessions there are, and what should be avoided. For example, if you have 1 Plenary and 5 invited, it would cause a difficult scheduling problem.

Multiple Sessions:

Normally, you would organize one session, but some of you may have been authorized to form more than one. If this is so, please keep the above constraints in mind. For example, if you are authorized to fill more than one session, you might have 1 Plenary and 7 talks.

Normally, you will only plan for one plenary talk, even if you are filling multiple sessions. This is because there will be some plenary speakers who do not have a session.

Poster Session and Stand By:

When organizing a session, you may want to have someone as standby in case one of your speakers drops out late in the planning. PQE makes this easy with a very nice Poster session on the last day of the conference. Thus, you can invite an extra person to be only giving a poster, but who could be “promoted” to a talk if necessary.

Contact Us:

Please email us and let us know what you are planning, by sending email to

As a minimum, we will need the names, affiliation, and email address of each person you are inviting, but any other feedback would be appreciated.

Organizing Committee:
     Marlan O. Scully, M. Suhail Zubairy, and George R. Welch.
     email: