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AsMA NewsSpace Medicine Association News President's Message by Mark R. Campbell, M.D. I continue to believe that space exploration, space medicine and the Space Medicine Association are at an important crossroads. We have a glorious past which many of our members were heavily involved in. We also have a glorious future which includes the finishing of the Shuttle program, continued participation in the International Space Station, the Constellation program and return to the Moon (and eventually on to Mars), and commercial space flight development. Many of our members are closely involved with all of these projects. Our organization also needs to be oriented in both directions. We are constantly improving upon our historical archives and have deposited these on the web site (www.asma.org/Organization/smb/smb.htm). Please consider contributing to the web site any archival information that you have. We are very open to suggestions on how to improve the web site and add to its content. Also consider depositing any electronic information that you have (photos, videos, documents, Powerpoint presentations) into the Space Medicine Bulletin Board on the web site as we have unlimited memory space. We continue to present the Hubertus Strughold Award annually to a member of the Space Medicine Association for past accomplishments in space medicine and for their contributions to the organization. We have recently established an endowment account, currently over $15,500.00, which will be used to fund a yearly scholarship (the Jeff Davis Scholarship) beginning in May 2009 and to increase the yearly Jeff Myers Young Investigators Award to $500.00. We are very appreciative to the corporate and individual donors who have made this possible (Wyle Labs, Kelsey Seybold Diagnostic Clinic, Comprehensive Health Services, Jeff Davis, Jeff Myers, and Phil Scarpa). Please consider a donation to this endowment fund as it greatly encourages our younger future members. We are expanding our number of student members (we now have ten) and would like to acknowledge our new life time members: Paul Antony, Genie Bopp, Mark Campbell, Jim Collier, Jeff Davis, John Darwood, Joe Dervay, Michael McGuire, Sangkun Park, Edward Powers, Sean Roden, Farhad Sahiar, Kazuhito Shimada, Jan Stepanek, Shepard Stone, and Sam Strauss. We have produced two very important position papers which have been approved and passed by the AsMA Council this year. These can be accessed on the web site and will be published soon in the journal. The Long-Duration Spaceflight paper is oriented towards the AsMA membership to increase their awareness of this rapidly developing project which is being followed with great interest. Another paper concerning the critical need to restore funding for Life Science Research on the International Space Station (Aviat. Space Environ. Med. 2008; 79:440–1) is directed towards the general public and Congressional funding. We have also reintroduced the Space Medicine Association Reports on the back pages of the journal to highlight the multiple areas of space medicine in which our members are involved. In the near future, we will be supporting a supplement to the journal concentrating on space medicine research (acceleration studies, hypobaric studies) performed over the years at Brooks AFB. We are very excited about the upcoming annual meeting in Boston in May. We plan on having a very exciting speaker at the Space Medicine Association luncheon on Thursday May 15, where we will also present the Hubertus Strughold Award, the Jeff Myers Young Investigators Award, and a President’s Lifetime Achievement Award. We are sponsoring (organized from conception) five panels and endorsing (recommending to our members) seven panels at this meeting. Panels sponsored (initialized and organized by the Space Medicine Association Executive Committee):
The Space Medicine Association Executive Committee is also endorsing (recommending that our membership would have an interest in attending) the following panels:
We believe that the quality of the abstracts that we reviewed at the Program Committee meeting in November was exceptional and that this will prove to be a very exciting meeting! We hope to see you in Boston! |
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