History of the WSA

The Western Spectroscopy Association was founded in 1953 by spectroscopists G.C. Pimentel, W.C. Merrill, J.W. Otvos, S.S. Penner, S.R. Smith and J.C.Guffy.

The WSA objective was to arrange regional meetings to be held in various western states with “Molecular Spectroscopy” taken broadly as its subject. The first WSA Conference was held at U.C. Berkeley in February 1954, the second at Cal Tech, the third in Berkeley and the fourth at UCLA. In 1958 the Conference met at Asilomar for the first time so that isolation would aid informal discussions. This proved to be quite popular and after the sixth conference at USC, Asilomar became the permanent site for the meeting, which is now held in late January and February each year.

During the first few meetings, a constitution for WSA was adopted and an election procedure was established to give the organization permanency and a balance between the “north and south”. The Executive Committee consists of eight members with two elected or appointed at each conference. A secretary/registrar may be appointed to give the association continuity. Over the years numerous scientists have served on the Executive committee and as conference officers and we now try to have representatives from each of the large universities, small colleges and industries, and National Laboratories on the committee as well.

The format of invited speakers has been largely followed through the present for this two day conference although a poster session was added in the mid 1980s and selected posdoc/graduate student talks were added in 1990. The meeting begins with dinner on Wednesday evening and a plenary opening talk. Invited talks are given Thursday morning followed by a poster session in the late afternoon. The day concludes with a banquet followed by a banquet address, poster session and social session. The final session on Friday morning contains a series of invited talks. On selected years, contributed talks by graduate students and postdoctoral associates are interspersed into the schedule.