Dear Partners and Friends:

It has now been almost 3 months since we met in beautiful Goa! Time fly’s by so fast…

We would like to give you a brief update on what happened since our meeting. First of all, as you already noticed, our website is up and running. Please click around and explore! We suggest you click on your browsers reload button to ensure that the newest website version is displayed correctly.

When browsing our website, the first thing you may notice is that the advertisement banner on the bottom of our website is gone now – we purchased the domain name and upgraded to “professional” status. Because we are not a web-designer, there are still some issues with alignment, resolution, and missing links but we hope to have those resolved soon (…possibly by hiring a student with adequate skills). Foremost of all, we have to come up with content for our home page, i.e. a brief description what IPCWR is all about and who we are. We will continue working on this. In the meantime, please make us aware of any mistakes, typos, and links that do not work correctly!!

We like to point out our first IPWRC publication! Cheryl Hapke and Tom Boving put together a brief paper about our meeting and submitted it to the US Geological Survey Newsletter. It was published, after review, in USGS Sounds Waves monthly newsletter (click here). You can also access a copy of the paper via our “Projects” page. Great job Cheryl!

Also, Cheryl is moving to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts! This is a very prestigious place to conduct coastal resources research. We are very happy for her and look forward to continued collaboration!

Dr. Choudri has been accepted to participate in the 2008 Global Social Benefit Incubator (GSBI) at the Santa Clara University, California, August 15-30 this year. This is a prestigious award and will enable Dr. Choudri to not only spread the word about IPCWR, but also to reach out to potential donors that may be interested in supporting our partnership.

Dr. Boving has been invited to speak at a conference on global economics and development at the University of Cape Town, South Africa in July this year. I will take the opportunity to advertise IPCWR, but more so, will get a chance to meet US AID officials. Hopefully this provides me with an opportunity to interest US AID in our work!

We would like to encourage everyone to keep working on your papers that we decided to submit as a Special Issue by December this year. We have been in contact with most of you since Goa, and their has been some progress made on the draft manuscripts already. As a reminder, we posted the list of the assigned topics here. Please recall that we agreed to submit a first draft by the end of September.

Since our meeting, Dr. Choudri and I have been in continuous contact with IUSSTF. We did submit a summary of our meeting and are currently exploring future funding for IPCWR.

As you can see, we are moving in the right direction! Please send us feedback on how you are doing. It would be nice to share anything related to IPCWR with the rest of the team.

Have a nice summer!

Tom and Choudri.