Controlled Release Society election open

The Controlled Release Society has opened voting for its 2026–2027 board, and the ballot is not symbolic: members are choosing a president-elect, a treasurer-elect, a secretary, and multiple directors-at-large before the vote closes on April 27, 2026. (controlledreleasesociety.org) This is the main professional society for researchers who work on getting drugs, vaccines, and other compounds to release at the right place and speed inside the body, and its own bylaws describe it as an international nonprofit organized to advance controlled delivery science. (controlledreleasesociety.org) In a nonprofit like this one, the board is the group that sets direction, approves budgets, and oversees the organization’s rules, so an election decides who gets to steer everything from meetings to member programs. The Controlled Release Society’s bylaws list the board and standing committees as part of that structure. (controlledreleasesociety.org) The candidate list shows how global the field has become. The 2026 ballot includes people from the United States, the Netherlands, France, the United Kingdom, Israel, Italy, Belgium, South Korea, and Chinese Taipei. (controlledreleasesociety.org) The top race is for president-elect, which is usually the role that feeds into the presidency later, and the two candidates are Bastiaan de Leeuw of Corbion in the Netherlands and Maria-Teresa Peracchia of Sanofi in France. (controlledreleasesociety.org) The treasurer-elect race has one named candidate, Luis Brito of Beam Therapeutics in the United States, and the secretary race lists Ryan Donnelly of Queen’s University Belfast in the United Kingdom. Those jobs sound administrative, but they control the money, records, and election process that keep a scientific society functioning. (controlledreleasesociety.org; controlledreleasesociety.org) The largest part of the ballot is director-at-large, where members are choosing from a wider bench that includes Juliane Nguyen, Paolo Decuzzi, Ronit Satchi-Fainaro, Rahima Benhabbour, Sei Kwang Hahn, and several others across universities and industry. That mix matters because the society represents both lab science and commercial drug development. (controlledreleasesociety.org) The candidates did not appear overnight. The society’s nominating committee is a standing committee chaired by the immediate past president, and its job is to build the list of candidates for the board from committee and member nominations. (controlledreleasesociety.org) That explains why the election opening is routine but still important: by the time members see names on the ballot, a smaller governance process has already filtered who is eligible, willing, and credible enough to run. The nomination form for this cycle is already closed to new submissions. (controlledreleasesociety.org; controlledreleasesociety.org) The board these winners will join is already stacked with senior figures in drug delivery, including 2025–2026 president María Vicent and president-elect Bruno Sarmento, so this vote is partly about who steps into that leadership pipeline next. (controlledreleasesociety.org) For members, the practical deadline is simple: the ballot is open now, the candidates are posted with bios and statements, and the window closes on April 27, 2026. In a specialized society, that is how committee work turns into who runs the field’s biggest tent. (controlledreleasesociety.org)