A Message from your AAPS RMDG Chair-Elect

Dear Colleagues,

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced us to re-imagine the 2020 AAPS RMDG Annual Meeting in Salt Lake City. The RMDG Steering Committee has carefully weighed and discussed various options for the 2020 meeting. Initially, we had hoped to merely delay an in-person meeting to later in the year, but we felt this option became increasingly untenable for safety and practical reasons.

After conferring within our own RMDG ranks, and having received advice from other professional scientific societies, the AAPS RMDG has elected to move to a virtual meeting format for this year. Many specialist societies have had to make difficult decisions to cancel, delay, or to move their annual meetings online. While an online meeting cannot capture all of the benefits an in-person meeting, we hope ‘going virtual’ will provide a valuable experience to our members and others within the pharmaceutical sciences within our region.

The typical ~2-day in-person program format will be truncated to a few hours of virtual programming. This streamlining led us to omit some favorite meeting features such as student/trainee abstract presentations. Nonetheless, we wish to keep a strong focus on early-career development for those within the pharmaceutical sciences. In addition to highlighting outstanding current pharmaceutical science in our region, we will also have interactive panel discussions designed to address and inform on career-related issues and consider opportunities within the current environment for pharmaceutical scientists. Indeed, a major rationale for going virtual instead of canceling this year has been feedback from members that there are pressing questions on how to effectively navigate the career path at this unusual time. Because so many facets of ‘ordinary’ career life have been disrupted in the pharmaceutical sciences, our meeting will bring together leaders in the field to help us better understand how to meaningfully approach critical career transitions for students, trainees, and early career professionals.

Another typical feature of our Annual meetings that will be postponed is the ceremony of leadership transition. Therefore, those serving on the Executive and Steering Committees will continue until the 2021 Annual meeting.

The AAPS RMDG 2020 Annual Meeting site will continue to be updated with more detail as we move closer to November 13.

One of the exciting elements of moving online this year is that we will gain some insight about what members like and what can be improved upon for future Annual meetings related to online features of access and interaction. Since our membership is defined by a sizeable geographic space, we are optimistic blended online and in-person meetings will become a standard feature of future AAPS RMDG meetings. Join us on November 13th to help shape the discussion around pharmaceutical science in the next decade.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Constance, PhD