Hello fellow ICRS members! At this juncture in time, we are approaching mid-summer and almost halfway through my first-year term as your president. I wanted to bring you up to speed on several things.
First, I would like to make you aware that we have a new executive director: Anneke Hibbel, Ph.D. has been with our office since January. She has been a pleasure to work with and has facilitated many business-related tasks. Being a scientist, she understands the needs of our members and has been attending all of the translational as well as many other committee meetings and has really transformed our efficiency. Please introduce yourselves at our next few meetings if you have not met her already.
We have had several successful meetings to date including the Manchester Focus Meeting on Osteotomies chaired by Leela Biant and Mike McNicholas, which was a great meeting and personally as a scientist I learned why and how these are performed. They hosted a wonderful faculty dinner at their historic home, which was nothing short of spectacular, followed by a great dinner at the Manchester United stadium for all the attendees. Thank you both Mike and Leela for your warm hospitality. The Focus Meeting on Imaging & Decision-Making was held shortly after in Vienna Austria and was hosted by Stefan Nehrer and Siegfried Trattnig. Although I did not get to go there, the feedback was quite positive for this event, and I thank Stefan and Siegfried for all their hard work organizing this meeting.
We now look forward to our upcoming Summit meeting in Catania Sicily headed up by our past president Elizaveta Kon and Peter Verdonk. This should be an outstanding meeting as both the location and program are quite interesting and looks to be well attended. I hope to see many of our members there in September!
Our journal JCJP needs your articles! In order to obtain PubMed Indexing and an Impact Factor, we need to have original manuscripts submitted and I am imploring all of us to help promote the journal as it will eventually be a revenue stream if we can make it work. I know we all have articles we have not yet published so please contribute.
I also want to thank our Executive and General Boards who do an outstanding job in making the ICRS the world class entity that it is. They work tirelessly on such things such fellowships, industry liaison, finance, and education to name but a few ands on behalf of all of us so thank you all for your efforts. The Executive Board is working hard to address our financial well-being in light of two years of Covid and the lack of income from in-person meetings as well as inflation. These are challenges not just specific to our society but many others well. We are exploring new revenue generators along with new sponsors and other opportunities. I greatly value my fellow EB members who always put what is best for the society above their personal agendas. We will be having a strategic meeting to focus on some of these issues and will have a course of action by the end to guide us going forward.
I am also pleased to announce that we have two new RUBY sponsors for 2025-2026: Smith & Nephew have signed on with us and will be present in Catania so please stop by their booth as they are now marketing Agili-C. Geistlich Ortho has also signed on as RUBY sponsor for 2025-2026 and we welcome their continued support. Geistlich will also be present in Catania. The ICRS Patient Registry also has recently got platinum-level support from Grünenthal, which will help support the Registry’s continued growth.
The ICRS started a Foundation several years ago spearheaded by past president Christoph Erggelet and Tim Spalding and was seeded with an initial endowment by fellow member Jack Farr. I would like to see this Foundation grow and be used for the benefit of our next-gen members career growth. I will personally be donating this year and when we renew our membership dues there will be a box one can check to donate. I will be working with the committee to both augment the funds but more importantly define what the funds should be used for.
Thank you for your time in reading this and enjoy the rest of the summer! I look forward to seeing many of you in September!
Daniel A. Grande
Read the Voice of the President #1 here
