In the January issue, the SIOP UN team presented its first article that shared the inside perspective of SIOP members who have worked with the UN as interns or volunteers.  As promised, in this follow-up article, we present insights of SIOP members who have worked as staff members for the United Nations.  

On February 14, after months of negotiations and the longest government shutdown in history, Congress passed a compromise $333 billion, seven-bill fiscal year (FY) 2019 appropriations “minibus” package.  President Trump signed the bill into law on February 15. This is the third and final minibus passed by Congress for FY 2019, just 1 day shy of the expiration of a stop-gap measure that averted another government shutdown for major research agencies such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).  The Department of Energy and Department of Defense received finalized FY 2019 under earlier minibus packages.

Entrepreneurship scholars have been open to new ways of conducting research and eager to explore how neurological topics may connect to more conventional entrepreneurship scholarship. Indeed, recent calls for papers indicate more papers connecting neuroscience and entrepreneurship are on the horizon (”Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice”, 2019). There have been several nonempirical publications and a handful of empirical papers written to explore ways of merging neurosciences with entrepreneurship. Thus, it appears that we are on the cusp of much more research in this area.

Have you ever wondered about the effects of automation in the workplace? In this issue of the Inter-national Practice Forum, we connected with Mary Ann, Tristan, and Hector at Chevron Products Com-pany to get a peek at how organizations are incorporating automation and how the potentially harmful and unanticipated results of it can be mitigated against.

The majority (over 70% in typical years) of the SIOP annual conference attendees have attended at least one other SIOP conference. Those I-O professionals and students already know the ins and outs of the conference and are likely looking forward to learning about the newest advances in research and practice, as well as reconnecting with friends and colleagues in the near future. However, if this year’s conference in Washington, DC/National Harbor follows the trend from 2018, well over one-quarter of all attendees will be first timers. For them, an annual meeting of this size and scope can prove to be daunting.