I will be completing my service on the Executive Committee (EC) of the OOAE Division this coming June, and will pass the OOAED torch to Prof. Arvid Naess who is the current First Vice-Chairman of the EC. The Division will be in excellent hands of an outstanding group of colleagues who will serve in the EC. In addition to the continuing voluntary services of Arvid Naess, Michael Bernitsas, Dan Valentine, Hisaaki Maeda, Terry Jones, John Robinson, and John Halkyard, the EC will be joined by two new members of outstanding reputation: Bob Randall of the Texas A&M University at College Station, and Chang-New Chen of the National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan, China. Many of you would know that Bob has already been actively involved in the student activities of the Division for a number of years, in charge of the paper and design competitions for graduate and undergraduate students.  Here are the slate of OOAED EC members for 2002-2003:

You will see in this issue of our newsletter that we have been concentrating our efforts on the upcoming 21st International OMAE conference that will be held in June 23-28, Oslo, Norway. This prestigious conference series has been our most important resource in exchanging information to keep us up-to-date in OOAE technology for 21 years, and I am proud to say that it is getting better and better. I am grateful for the leadership of Arvid Naess as the Conference Chair and Subrata Chakrabarti as the Technical Program Chair of OMAE 2002, and to a great group of friends who coordinate the seven symposia, and to all the session organizers, reviewers and authors, who have spent countless hours in making sure that we can have another great gathering of colleagues and friends in Oslo. Hats off to them, as well as to Ramon Johnson of ASME, our Division Administrator, for his unbelievable support of the conference, to Christina Perakis, the Coordinator of our new OMAE 2002 Web Tool (a.k.a. to me `electronic OMAE’) for her efforts and patience in responding to our unending requests, and to Ketill Børge-Ask of the Norwegian Society of Chartered Engineers for his tremendous efforts in the local organization, and to many other individuals impossible to list in this small corner. I am grateful to you all for your help.

In reporting the activities of your Division, I must list some other issues that we have been working on since my last report. They are:

1) A new OOAED Brochure is in the making and will be finalized soon. Please request extra copies of it from ASME (johnsonr@asme.org) in May to send them to your colleagues who are not members of the Division; we need more members to strengthen our activities and we need your help in recruiting them.

2) If you were wondering where we will gather in June of 2003, you will see in this issue that Cancun, Mexico is the venue of choice for OMAE 2003, as unanimously selected by the International Conference Committee during its meeting in Rio de Janeiro last year. This will be the first time that we will have an OMAE conference in Mexico; what an exciting meeting it is going to be! The preparations for OMAE 2003 have already started under the leadership of Oscar Valle Molina of INSTITUTO MEXICANO DEL PETROLEO, which is the local organizing institute.

3) Two new co-sponsoring societies of the OMAE conferences have joined us recently; they are the Marine Technology Society of the US and the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers of Taiwan, China. We welcome them and their members with great enthusiasm, and look forward to a fruitful relation of mutual interest in the years to come. The efforts of Dr. Andrew Clark, President of MTS, and Prof. Chang-New Chen, the Representative of SNAME of Taiwan, China, in this regard are greatly appreciated.

4) Not only must we look ahead but we should also look back to the history of our profession to remind us of what we have done (so that we do not reinvent the wheel) and also of the accomplishments to honor (so that we do not forget). In this spirit, EC member John Robinson has recently initiated a "History of Our Profession" project. Please contact him at jtrobinson@Shell.Com to provide your accounts of historical events in our profession.

5) The Extended Executive Committee (EEC) of the Division held its first meeting of the year in Houston on January 12-13. Seventeen members of the EEC attended. The conference activities, OMAE 2002 web site, OOAE Division report, long term strategic planning, student activities, membership issues, JOMAE, participation in other ASME activities, and conference and division awards were among the many subjects discussed.

In closing, I would like to say that it has been a great pleasure to serve on the EC of the Division. I am deeply thankful to all my friends on the EEC and to the Chair of the Energy Resources Board and Senior Vice-President of the Council on Engineering of ASME, Frank Adamek, who have helped and supported me during my tenure as the Chair. It was a great learning experience for me. And I must kindly ask all members of the Division who have not yet served in Division committees to give it a try and see how fun and rewarding this experience can be. I will continue to be involved in the newly established Ocean Engineering Symposium of the OMAE conference series, and to serve in the Advisory Committee of the Division, so I will see you around. Thank you for all your support.

R. Cengiz Ertekin