Dear Colleagues, After having served as IRTF chair since 2011, Lars Eggert will step down as Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) chair during IETF 98 in March 2017. The IAB has appointed Allison Mankin as his successor, and in the months to come Allison will be working with Lars in transitioning responsibilities. Allison Mankin is an Internet protocol lead and researcher based in the Washington DC area, and holds the position of Senior Director, Public DNS, at Salesforce. She has a long history in and around the IETF and IRTF, including serving as Nomcom Chair, Transport AD (most recently stepping down in 2006), and IPng AD. In the IRTF, she chaired the Reliable Multicast RG and then moved it to the IETF as the RMT WG. She has worked in a diverse set of industry, academic and government settings. Some of her positions prior to Salesforce were at Verisign, JHU Applied Physics Lab, the US National Science Foundation (NSF), Bell Labs, and USC/ISI. As a program director at the US NSF, Allison was a leader of the Future Internet Design (FIND) program, which initiated the funding of info-centric networking and also played an early role in software-defined networking. On behalf of the IAB I would like to thank Lars for serving the community by fulfilling the role with zeal and thank Allison for taking up the responsibility. I would also like to thank the other volunteers for this position; with so many good candidates, it was a difficult choice for the IAB. For more information about the IRTF, please see https://irtf.org/. Andrew Sullivan for the IAB -- IAB Chair (Andrew Sullivan) iab-chair@xxxxxxx