A brief history of the ABA and ASB

The Asian Biophysics Association (ABA) represents biophysical societies from Australia (Hill 2019), China (Xu 2019), Hong Kong (Zhu 2019), India (Jagannathan 2019), Japan (Kandori 2019), Korea (Lim et al. 2019) and Taiwan (Lyu 2019), and aims to strengthen and promote biophysics in the Asia-Pacific region. The ABA was founded at the 5th East Asian Biophysics Symposium (EABS) held in Okinawa in 2006 as an Asian academic association t. At that time, the incorporation of Australia and India was approved by five original members (China-Beijing, China-Taipei, Hong Kong, Japan, and Korea) resulting in the seven-country association. The 6th ABA Symposium, that inherited the spirit and numbering of EASB, was held in Hong Kong in 2009. The past president of ABA (2015–2018) was Professor Xiyun Yan from the Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing. The current president of ABA is Associate Professor Danny Hatters from The University of Melbourne. The Australian Society for Biophysics (ASB) was formed in 1975, the first annual general meeting being held at the University of New England, Armidale, in 1976, with annual conferences held for the 42 years since. The current President of the Society was Dr. Adam Hill from the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute, Sydney.

This special issue of Biophysical Reviews is based on the proceedings of the first joint meeting between the ABA and the ASB. The meeting was held at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, from the 2nd to the 6th of December 2018. It represents the 10th ABA Symposium and the 42nd Annual Conference of the ASB.

Conference proceedings and features

The conference was co-chaired by Professor Renae Ryan (The University of Sydney) and Associate Professor Danny Hatters (The University of Melbourne), who are now the secretary and president, respectively, of the ABA. Renae and Danny and their team did a superb job of organising an exciting and well-attended meeting. The conference consisted of a total of 16 scientific sessions (run in two parallel streams) consisting of nine themes: Bioinformatics, Biophysics and Medicine, Membrane Biophysics, MRI and PET, Nanobiophysics, Neuroscience, Omics, Structural Biology, and Super-Resolution Microscopy. Table 1 gives a breakdown of these sessions, the speakers, and chairs. A total of 87 speakers presented, including 46 invited speakers, of whom three presented plenary talks. Thirty individuals chaired the sessions. A total of 120 poster presentations completed the scientific proceedings. Table 1 also includes a reference to both review articles and summaries of several session themes submitted to Biophysical Reviews, with these reviews categorised into their respective themes.

Table 1 Session themes held at the ASB/ABA joint meeting, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia December 2–6, 2018
Full size table

A social highlight of the conference for the international visitors to the conference was both the Tuesday afternoon visit to the Healesville Sanctuary, where attendees were able to see several Australian animals such as koalas, platypuses, kangaroos, echidnas, and emus. The conference dinner, held at the Sea Life aquarium, was a further highlight.

Plenary sessions and ASB McAulay-Hope prize

Professor Zihe Rao from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, was the first plenary speaker, discussing the type 2 B-Caspid and C-Caspid structures of the herpes simplex virus. The second plenary lecture was delivered by Professor Satyajit Mayor from the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore, India. He discussed plasma membrane dynamics and mechano-chemical control of membrane composition in living cells. The third plenary, presented by Professor Jackie Ying from the NanoBio Lab, Singapore, described her work on using nanotechnology as a diagnostic tool for infectious disease detection, cancer diagnosis, genotyping assays, and food testing. Professor Ying was the recipient of a Georgina Sweet travel award supporting the attendance of a female keynote speaker at an Australian Conference. The ASB’s highest award, the McAulay-Hope prize for original biophysics, was awarded to Professor Mibel Aguilar from Monash University for her work in developing new methods to study model cell membranes (Aguilar 2019).

Overall remarks

This was the first joint meeting held between the ASB and the ABA, and the editors would like to make note of the excellent scientific sessions, from the plenary sessions to the posters, representing a wide range of scientific viewpoints. In particular, the mix of scientists from the Asia-Pacific region and beyond, coupled with the relatively small size of the conference (239 delegates), meant that attendees were able to mingle collegially in an environment conducive to initiating new collaborative efforts among attendees both locally and internationally. The editors look forward to both the next ABA Symposium to be held in Taiwan and the next ASB conference and are excited at the prospects of increasingly productive relationships among biophysicists in the Asia-Pacific region.