I would like to congratulate our 50-year members, Roy L. (“Pete”) Orndorff, Jr., P.E. and John T. Pope, P.E. whom I had the honor of recognizing at our January Joint meeting with Akron ASME/Akron ASM Wednesday, January 16, 2008 at Akron's New Era Restaurant along with the other service awards. They deserve this great recognition for all of their years of contributions to our society and the engineering field in general. I would also like to thank Mr. James Tanzosh, Manager of Materials and Manufacturing Technology for the Babcock & Wilcox Power Generation Group, Inc. for his informative presentation "Materials Challenges for the Advanced Ultra-Supercritical Boiler." Judging from the fact that we were busting out of the seams at the New Era, I know that our members thought that it was interesting and relevant to many of our interests.

We also had a great turnout for the National Engineers Week Banquet held at Emidio & Sons on February 21st, 2008. It was our Akron Section of ASME's turn to serve as Host Society and thanks to Brent Sisler, P.E., this year's Banquet Chair, the event was a total success. Great job, Brent!

Our upcoming schedule is packed with activities from our Student Papers Night (March 13th, 2008), the ACESS Joint Member Societies Meeting (March 20th, 2008), and the Industry Expo (April 8th, 2008), to our tour of the City of Orrville's Power Plant (May 14th, 2008). As you can see, our local Akron Section Board has been quite busy planning events that we hope that you will find of interest. Details of all of these meetings can be found elsewhere in this Newsletter. We hope to see you there!

As many of you know, we are always looking for active participation from our members in helping to plan and execute our activities. We welcome any of you to attend our monthly board meetings. Please contact us for meeting times and places so that you can give us any input that you may have. This is your section and you don't have to be an official board member to be a part of the planning process.

In closing, I would like to personally invite each of you to come to one of our activities. We make them fun and interesting and it is a great place to network with others that might have interests similar to yours.

Matt Pruszynski
2007-2008 Section Chair, Akron ASME
matt@americashobbyhouse.com