USERN Presidential Election, from 2023 to 2025

Scientists love to improve existing systems. As a scientific organization, we at USERN believe in using novel ideas and new strategies to improve our organization. That’s why every three years, we have a significant change in management.

According to USERN’s statute, The president of USERN can serve for two consecutive terms only. The first president of USERN was its founder, Prof. Nima Rezaei, who served his first term from 2016 until 2019. In 2019, USERN’s advisory board members chose its Policy Making Council (PMC). Prof. Rezaei was reelected as president by a majority vote of the PMC. As Prof. Rezaei’s second term came to an end in October 2022, 76 members of the advisory board from 21 different fields announced their candidacy for PMC membership. One person was chosen from each field by popular vote, for a total of 21 candidates. USERN’s new advisory board members are:

• Agricultural Sciences: Professor Idupulapati Rao
• Biology & Biochemistry: Professor Daniel Klionsky
• Chemistry: Professor Federico Bella
• Clinical Medicine: Professor Reza Malekzadeh
• Computer Science: Professor Jan Treur
• Environment/Ecology: Professor Artemi Cerda
• Economics & Business: Professor Boqiang Lin
• Engineering: Professor MohammadAli Ahmadi
• Geosciences: Professor Hai Cheng
• Immunology: Professor Nima Rezaei
• Materials Science: Professor Manoj Gupta
• Mathematics: Professor Juan Jose Nieto
• Microbiology: Professor Daniel Sauter
• Molecular Biology & Genetics: Professor Jonathan Howard
• Neuroscience & Behavior: Professor George Perry
• Pharmacology: Professor Moein Moghimi
• Physics: Professor Tommaso Dorigo
• Plant: Professor Markku Kulmala
• Psychiatry/Psychology: Professor Steven Hayes
• Social Sciences, General: Professor Filip Dochy
• Space Sciences: Professor Bahram Mobasher

In the second round, members of the advisory board announced their candidacy for the presidency. A total of eight members ran for the presidency:

• Professor Filip Dochy 
• Professor Frank Sellke
• Professor Imran Ali
• Professor Ji Huan He 
• Professor Manoj Gupta 
• Professor Mohammad Abdollahi 
• Professor Shuji Ogino
• Professor Tommaso Dorigo 

After a vote by the newly-elected PMC members, Prof. Tommaso Dorigo was elected as the president of USERN for 2023-2025 by a majority vote. Prof. Dorigo is an experimental particle physicist working as a researcher for the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) and is a member of the CMS experiment at CERN. He’s been with us since the beginning, giving several wonderful speeches and instructing several workshops at USERN congresses including this year’s congress. Furthermore, He has published many articles in collaboration with USERN.

In this year’s USERN congress in Oman, Prof. Dorigo was officially introduced as USERN president for 2023-2025. In his inauguration speech, Prof. Dorigo acknowledged Prof. Rezaei’s thoughtful leadership in his six years as USERN president, turning it into a large organization with many top scientists in its advisory board and more than 20,000 members worldwide. Seeing this as a great potential, Prof. Dorigo asserted our duty as a community to work hard in order to reach our shared goal of promoting science without borders. We should exert our utmost effort to progress and beat the challenges that we have in front of us. Today more than ever, we feel the need for scientists from different disciplines to unite our strengths to overcome global challenges such as climate change, overpopulation, and famine. He mentioned USERN as the perfect ground for achieving these goals.

We wish Prof. Dorigo luck in his new role as USERN president and look forward to seeing great progress under his leadership.