General information

The General Meeting of the Association takes place every three years. It is the largest and most important of the meetings sponsored by the Association, and is the only occasion on which members are able to meet and discuss their work with a large proportion of the membership. It is also the occasion on which the Business Meeting (or 'members' meeting,' as it is called in the Articles) takes place. Among other matters, this is when new members of the Executive Committee are elected, and the roles of President, Secretary, and Treasurer change hands.

Organisation

The philosophy of the General Meeting is that all members should be able to present their research. With the increasing size of the Association, it is no longer possible to ensure that all members are able to make oral presentations. In recent meetings the role played by poster sessions has therefore gained in importance. A typical General Meeting consists of a number of symposia, a number of individual paper sessions, and two or more poster sessions. An attempt is made to strike a good balance between offering a broad choice of presentations, on the one hand, and keeping the number of parallel sessions to a minimum, on the other.

Whereas the task of running a General Meeting used to be one that was taken on by a local organiser, who made local arrangements, and the Secretary of the Association, who looked after the scientific programme, the scope and complexity of the current General Meetings means that local arrangements are dealt with by the Local Organising Committee, and the setting up of the programme is handled by a specially appointed Scientific Programme Committee.

The Association supports each General Meeting financially.

Past General Meetings

1963 December 12 - 16 Sorrento, Italy [before foundation]

1964 December 11 - 15 Frascati, Italy [before foundation]

1966 March 27 - April 1 Royaumont, France [1st official plenary meeting]

1969 April 8 - 12 Leuven, Belgium 1972 April 12 - 15 Leuven, Belgium 1975 April 8 - 12 Bielefeld, (West) Germany 1978 March 28 - April 1 Weimar, (East) Germany 1981 April 5 -9 Sussex, England 1984 May 8 - 12 Tilburg, Netherlands 1987 May 19 - 24 Varna, Bulgaria 1990 June 19 - 24 Budapest, Hungary 1993 September 15 - 20 Lisbon, Portugal 1996 July 13 - 18 Gmunden, Austria 1999 July 6-11 Oxford, UK 2002 June 26-29 San Sebastian, Spain 2005 July 19-23 Wuerzburg, Germany 2008 June 10-14 Opatija, Croatia