Silzer and colleagues raise a valid concern about practitioners’ continuing dissatisfaction as revealed in the latest Practitioner Need Survey (see Silzer & Parson, 2015, for a comparison of 2008 vs. 2015 results). Several areas continue to be a concern:  practitioner recognition through awards and election to Fellow status, support for practitioner career advancement, support for practice-oriented research and projects, election to leadership roles, support for obtaining licensure, and overall influence on the future of SIOP.  We agree that SIOP needs to do more in these areas.  

When setting the practitioner agenda for the future, it is important to review and acknowledge the work that SIOP leadership, committees, and volunteers have accomplished over the last several years to address practitioners’ needs. Many actions and programs initiated by volunteer committees and leadership have yielded positive results and, in our view, have closed gaps in service to practitioners. However, other gaps exist, some of which can be addressed while others are more structural and therefore more difficult to fix.  Our intention here is to provide a path for making more progress in the future.

The Professional Practice Committee (PPC), in recent years, has been working to establish and build relationships with organizations in the workplace/employee health and well-being field in order to promote SIOP’s involvement in research and practice efforts, and to identify opportunities for future collaboration to advance practice in this area. Within the past several months the PPC has focused its goals to also provide practitioners with resources and tools to further educate them on research, trends, and best practices, as well as build communities of interest internally and externally to SIOP. Our goal with this column is to provide a brief background on the importance of workplace health and well-being, describe some of the external organizations and resources currently available to practitioners, and outline more details about the PPC’s plans and how practitioners can contribute.

In this special issue we present the second part of our interview with Dr. Vivienne Ming, an accomplished scientist and entrepreneur with ties to several organizations including the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience, Socos, Gild, ShiftGig, Bay Area Rainbow Day Camp,and StartOut. In the first part of our conversation, we discussed her work that leverages the power of algorithms, technology, and psychology. From these domains, Vivienne Ming and her colleagues have been able to measure how students think about course topics and precisely predict student grades. She has used a similar approach to predict job performance for someone without previous experience. Excitingly, she has developed a product that provides individualized intervention recommendationsto parents for their children, which arrives via SMS messaging. This product can easily be extended to the work context to help managers get the most out of their employees.

We present the second part of our conversation in this issue, where we shift focus toward theoretical neuroscience. In this issue, we discuss the topic of cognitive neuroprosthetics and tiptoe up to the beginning of the massive task of considering its implications for society and the workplace. We invite you to consider this conversation, imagine the possibilities, and begin your discussions about future policy needs.

“Naïve” is the operative word in the preceding sentence, as most TIPreaders will not be surprised to learn that there is no central registry of senior members of the SIOP LGBTQ community. Craig crafted an email sent to some of his personal friends of similar vintage (i.e., old, and you know who you are!), describing our purpose and asking for help in identifying folks to approach for this column.  Thanks again to those Craig reached out to for their encouragement and referrals we received!  With 20/20 hindsight, we probably should have contacted past chairs of the SIOP LGBTQ committee, as the committee has been around for some time.  As luck would have it, one of the individuals to whom we were referred had in fact held this post;Gene Johnsonput us in touch with others.

Dear readers, I am very excited (and daunted) to follow in Marcus Dixon’sfootsteps with Max. Classroom Capacity! It’s an incredibly tough act to follow (if you haven’t read his farewell columnlast issue, you must!). To use a basketball analogy, I feel a bit like how Alonzo Gee must have felt replacing LeBron James after he “took his talents to South Beach” and left the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2010. Ever heard of Alonzo Gee? Exactly… Nevertheless, let’s get started! 

I’ve had a few months to reflect on what Max. Classroom Capacity has been and where I think I can take it. My two goals for this first solo column are to (1) tell you a bit about myself and (2) provide a mission statement of sorts to give you a sense of what to expect in the near future.

As to goal #1, let me tell you a few stories about me. I am an associate professor of Psychology at Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. While I spend a lot of time and energy conducting research, I am proud to consider myself first and foremost a teacher. I am the son of two teachers. My father was a chemistry professor at a small college in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where I grew up. My mother was an occasional substitute teacher who spent most of her work life as a reporter for a small local newspaper. As early as elementary school I remember feeling a great sense of satisfaction when I could “translate” my teachers’ lectures to classmates in ways that (hopefully) made them better understand and connect with the material.