For the past several years, the Scientific Program Committee (SPC) has identified scientific themes for each upcoming annual meeting in advance of the program proposal submission deadline. The rationale for having these thematic areas was that it provided a level of cohesiveness to the annual meeting program as well as focus for premeeting promotional materials.
Unfortunately, the identification of themes prior to the program submission deadline also had some unintended consequences, one of which was that it created confusion. Often program submitters believed that if their program proposals were focused on one of the designated thematic areas, it would have a greater likelihood of being selected by the SPC. In fact this was not the case. Similarly, some felt that the pre-selection of themes for the annual meeting, to some degree influenced what science was being presented at the annual meeting.
In order to retain the beneficial aspects of programmatic themes, the SPC has made a modification for the 2014 Annual Meeting that should eliminate the unintended consequences discussed above. Specifically, program themes will be retained; however, the themes will be identified after the scientific program proposals have been selected. In other words, after the SPC selects the strongest program proposals they will then identify the meeting themes by looking for commonality across the overall program. By doing so, the goal is to have the membership and their strongest science drive the meeting themes rather the SPC. After the 2014 Annual Meeting, we will solicit your input to learn whether you found this change helpful.