The Road to ISMRM 2016: The program is coming together

Happy new year to you all! I thought I would take this opportunity to give you an update on the status of the planning for the ISMRM annual meeting. We had about 5900 abstracts submitted in November using our new HTML-based system. These were reviewed by over 600 reviewers in December. Then starting on January 16th, they came to the 65-member Annual Meeting Program Committee which met in Sedona, Arizona, USA. The strong El Nino this year brought snow and rain and cool weather to the center of the desert. But this weather was perfect for sitting in a conference room working more than 12 hours a day!

By the end of this meeting, we had the entire scientific program planned as well as the beginnings of the 2017 educational and plenary program. You all should have received a notification about the status of your 2016 scientific abstract by now.

For those of you interested in the process of how this all comes together, I would point you to an article on Demystifying the Annual Meeting Program Committee that was put together a few years ago. It’s slightly out of date with the new abstract submission system and some other details, but the basic process of how your abstract was handled is contained there.

In the next few weeks, we’ll be posting updates of several events that will be happening through the week. While details are still being worked out, especially first-time students and fellows of the society should try to leave the evening of Saturday 7th open. And as always, our closing celebration on Thursday night will be something very unique and I highly recommend that you stay if you can. We’ll also be working on some new ways that you can communicate with each other to help you grow your network of MRI scientists and clinicians.

As always, keep an eye on the ISMRM homepage. I look forward to seeing you all in Singapore!

— Mark