August 2022

Dear Colleagues,

It is my distinct pleasure to serve as incoming President along with Dr. Ray Mattingly as our new Treasurer (joining Drs. Alvin Terry (Treasurer) and Drs Don Bers, Joan Heller Brown, and Scott Waldman (Councilors)). We thank Dr. Kent Vrana and Dr. David Busija for their excellent service and look forward to meeting all of you soon in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico from Jan 22-26, 2023.  The AMSPC 2023 Meeting will be held at the Marriott Puerto Vallarta Resort & Spa, located on the beach within the exclusive Area of Marina Vallarta; only 5 minutes away from Puerto Vallarta Airport and 15 minutes from downtown. All rooms are ocean view and include buffet breakfast.

The purpose of this note is to personally invite you to this meeting.  I understand that this is short notice, but, as leaders of Departments, your participation is critical for furthering our mission of fostering a rich, collegial, collaborative environment between the Chairs.

Emerging from the pandemic also means that we are faced with many competing interests for our time, whereby attending a Chairs’ meeting may or may not be your priority. For those of you who are already planning to attend, thank you. For the others, I will point out that difficult times are perhaps ahead of us in terms of an anticipated recession, budget cuts, etc., in which we Chairs need to be prepared to lead Departments against such prevailing winds. Under such circumstances, we believe that our camaraderie at the upcoming meeting should serve as an excellent value proposition to learn from each other on creative approaches to manage and lead our units, while also being able to advance pharmacology research and education. 

We have an exciting program with several new features which is currently being populated with an admixture of scientific and mentoring sessions, including personnel from the Federal Government, NIH, and words of wisdom from our dynamic past president Dr Kent Vrana.  We are also excited to introduce a new ‘speed-mentoring’ session pairing up junior Chairs with senior Chairs.  

I truly believe that as a group our collective experience, energy and brilliance will remain untapped unless we make an effort to leverage the opportunity to know each other. We need your ideas. Candidly, we may not be able to achieve much alone, but together, we could be a force to reckon with to raise our national leadership in Pharmacology. 

Lastly, in the interest of increasing participation, we urge you to consider bringing along another Chair of Pharmacology who has never attended or has not attended this meeting in the last 5 years, whereby we will reimburse both the Chairs a $500 discount each for your expenses.

For further enquiries if any, please contact me or our meeting organizer, Karen Gottlieb.

Sincerely,

Bina Joe, PhD

President, AMSPC