Sept 2022
Dear All,
I am delighted to be writing my first message a President of the BRS. It is a great honor to serve you all and to continue to shape the future of our Society. I am writing this after our first in-person meeting for three years, a great success thanks to Alex Ireland and his LoC in Manchester. Taking over the helm in Manchester, where I started my bone research career felt like excellent symmetry. Certainly, having started there as an early-stage researcher and the importance of mentorship to help shape futures is something I’m keen the Society continues to explore over coming years.
I would like to say a big thank you to Kassim who led us through the pandemic and its challenges extremely well. We had great success at the online meetings in 2020 and 2021 and thanks to his leadership the Society is in an excellent position. Sarah Allison, who finished her term this year, has been co-opted back onto the committee as maternity leave cover for our new Committee Member, Louise Stephen. A big welcome back to Allie Gartland (Sheffield), as President-Elect and to Celia Gregson (Bristol) has joined as a co-opted Clinical committee member to increase the clinical expertise on our committee.
As a committee we are here to drive the committee forwards, adapting our strategies to the ongoing challenges of attracting and retaining PhD’s students and post-docs into the field to build the future of musculoskeletal research and our Society. Finding new ways for capacity building is one of the key aims for my President’s term. One such example would be our exchange programme with the Australia New Zealand Bone and Mineral Society, which will be happening again next year. Funding for fellowships, project and programme grants is increasingly competitive and we will continue to seek ways to support and advise on these processes, this includes Kassim’s initiatives to fund workshops for to work-up grants are still open and provide an excellent opportunity to get people together, either virtually or in-person.
Finally, please do look out for our joint meeting with ECTS in Liverpool next year. It will be earlier, in April, and the abstract deadline will also be earlier in December. Its so exciting to finally be organising this meeting, which is something I started working on as Secretary in 2015. Past-president Jim Gallagher is chairing our Local Organising Committee and we’ll be able to share the programme soon.
We have a committee meeting in November so please do feed-back any ideas to info@boneresearchsociety.org on how we can improve the BRS and support you further.
Very best wishes,
Prof. Kate Ward, kw@mrc.soton.ac.uk
President of the BRS
