President's Message | June 2018

Rick Domann, Ph.D., The University of Iowa

It is the summer of redox biology. As I put pen to paper the Society for Free Radical Research International (SFRR-I) has just adjourned its highly successful scientific program held in Lisbon, Portugal, and hosted by our sister society SFRR-Europe; Congratulations! For those interested in viewing photos of the meeting, award winners, and social events follow @sfrri2018 on Twitter. As you may know, all SfRBM members are automatically members of SFRR-I, and many SfRBM members took advantage of the opportunity to register for the international meeting at member rates and enjoy the sights, sounds, and tastes of Lisbon.

Meanwhile, “back at the ranch” in Omaha, Nebraska, where the weather and the redox biology were both HOT, the SfRBM Regional & Oberley Symposium recently concluded. The Regional conference was graciously hosted by the Redox Biology group at the University of Nebraska and U. Nebraska Medical Center; thank you for your hospitality and for the amazing scientific program that you assembled! One must normally attend a national or international conference to encounter such a deep collection of talent and creativity. Congratulations to the organizing committee and special thanks to all those that registered and actively participated in the conference. Check SfRBM’s social media feeds for photos of the event.

The Regional Symposia have become a showcase for established and rising talent in the field, and afford more opportunities at the podium and closer interactions among colleagues, peers, and mentors across disciplines and institutions than is often possible at larger conferences. Since their inception as a pilot program three summers ago, the SfRBM Regional Symposia have flourished and continued to grow in popularity. Therefore in response to the demand, the Society is committed to continuing to support this format of smaller regional science conferences in partnership with host universities and institutions. Council recognizes the need for developing a formal application process for interested institutions. Additionally, Council is also considering the concept of vetting more than one regional symposium in the same year, as long as the applicant institutions represent significantly separated geographic regions within any given year.

Earlier this spring from March 24-25, 2018, the SfRBM Council convened for 2 days in Chicago for a strategic planning meeting to chart the future direction of the society. Having secured a lasting agreement with Elsevier, publisher of our Society’s official journals Free Radical Biology & Medicine, and Redox Biology, it is time to focus attention on the Society’s 5-year strategic plan to leverage this relationship for mutual benefit of the Society, its members, and its publisher. To this end, and out of Council’s intensive two-day session in Chicago this spring, the Society has forged an updated 5-year strategic plan to guide the Society into the future. Details of the 5-year strategic plan and timetable for implementation can be found here. With mid-summer now approaching and the Regional, International and Gordon conferences largely behind us, the SfRBM 2018 Annual Meeting and conference program is taking shape; scientific symposium sessions are set, speakers are invited, abstracts are being collected, and it promises to be an exciting and impactful conference! Follow meeting preparations and psych-up at #SfRBM2018. Besides the parallel themed symposia, there will be the usual Free Radical School with an emphasis on back-to-basics lecture formats, 2 pre-meeting workshops to choose from, as well as an associated satellite meeting of the HNE Club in Nashville immediately prior to the SfRBM Conference.

I am particularly proud of our Society and the values and mores for which it stands. After tallying up the invited speaker demographics for the symposia and Free Radical School sessions at the upcoming 2018 national conference, it’s impossible not to notice that there will equal numbers of women and men on the podium this year. This should please all of us but most certainly the Women in Science committee who have long sought to equalize gender inclusion. These inclusion statistics place SfRBM at the vanguard of gender inclusion and should serve as an example to SFRBM’s sister societies. And with Phyllis Dennery preparing to ascend to president at the upcoming meeting, women are poised to lead the society now and into the future. It’s in the spirit of fostering even further inclusion that SfRBM’s Council will create a Committee on Diversity to promote inclusion across all under-represented demographics including socioeconomic in free radical biology and medicine, another outcome of the strategic planning meeting in March 2018.

Finally, I want to announce SfRBM’s new strategic partnership with the Radiation Research Society. Under the terms of our reciprocal agreement effective immediately in 2018, SfRBM members who are 1^st time attendees at a Radiation Research Society meeting will be able to register to attend the meeting at RRS member rates and vice versa. In later years each society will be invited to submit a symposium featuring members of their society for review by the program committee of the other society for possible inclusion of such sessions at one another’s national meetings. For those interested to take advantage of this opportunity this year, the annual meeting of RRS is at the Historic Chicago Hilton on September 23-26. Additional details can be found here

Please stay tuned to www.sfrbm.org for further announcements on the SfRBM 2018 scientific program including travel award winners and afternoon speakers selected from the abstracts. Watch SfRBM’s Facebook page for more announcements, and join our Twitter feed @SfRBM If you haven’t already done so, make plans now to join us at the Hilton Palmer House in Chicago, November 14-17, 2018 for SfRBM 2018. I wish a wonderful summer season to one and all!