The following is a report of the results relevant to VSS’s venue - the TradeWinds at St. Pete’s Beach Florida.

Overall, respondents were very satisfied with VSS 2023, with 94% of respondents rating the conference as Good or Excellent.

Distribution of academic ‘ranks’

We asked our members Please choose the option below that corresponds most closely to your current professional status:. 49% of responded reported as faculty, 16% as postdocs, and 30% as grad students. Here is a distribution of the academic ‘ranks’.

Residence

We asked members: What region of the world do you currently reside in? 64% were from US and Canada, and 26% were from Europe (and UK). The distribution is as follows:

Self-identification

We asked: Do you self-identify as belonging to any of the following communities. Check all that apply. Of those that did not check Prefer no answer, 33% chose one or more community.

Venue

We asked members to choose the importance of various factors affecting the choice of future meeting sites and venues. The following is a rank order of importance. Ranks are based on the difference between the number of respondents choosing “Very important” minus the number of respondents choosing “Little or no importance”. Positive numbers mean a greater percent of respondents chose Very important than Little or no importance.

With regards to whether or not to leave Florida in the future, we asked our members to choose one of the options to the question Which of the following statements most closely aligns with your views?

Calculating the percent of respondents choosing to leave or stay in Florida is complicated because the survey did not provide this binary set of options.

Percent ‘leave’

49 respondents chose to enter written comments. Of these, 14 indicated a desire to leave Florida. If we define choosing to leave as choosing either VSS should leave Florida only if other venues would not substantially increase conference and travel costs, VSS should leave Florida regardless of whether or not other venues would substantially increase conference and travel costs or Written response: Leave (red bars), then 45% of those that responded to this question chose to leave Florida. 29 members did not respond to this question. If we include all 565 members who took the survey, then 42% chose to leave Florida.

Percent ‘stay’

If we define choosing to stay as choosing either either VSS should remain in Florida because it is a scientific society that should not be swayed by political considerations, VSS should remain in Florida because it provides an excellent venue for the annual meeting or VSS should remain in Florida but take initiatives to support those affected within our community and/or the state of Florida (blue bars) then 30% of those that responded to this question chose to stay in Florida. If we include all 565 members who took the survey, then 28% chose to stay in Florida.

Interestingly, there was remarkably little difference in the choice to leave Florida between faculty and other respondents (\(\chi^2\)(1) = 0.004, p = 0.9493):

Reasons for not attending VSS 2023

For those that did not attend VSS 2023, when asked The main reasons I did not register to attend VSS were (check all that apply), 25 (23%) reported that concerns about either the political climate” or personal safety in Florida kept them from attending. The overall frequency of responses are: