Yoel Sadovsky
Yoel Sadovsky, MD
SRI President, 2016-2017
In March of 2016, when I became SRI president for its 63-64th year, the major task related to the transition of our administrative support office had been completed by the recent presidents. A strategic plan was approved and deployed. Importantly, the quality of the science at the meetings was good, and SRI had a solid financial foundation. However, there was an obvious need to reassess SRI’s governing structure. Specifically, the annual rotation of the president compromised long-term planning and put the society at risk for a volatile decision-making process. The society’s governance and the bylaws had not been updated for several years, creating confusion with respect to executive decisions, council authority and oversight. Therefore, after careful deliberations we re-defined SRI’s leadership and established an executive committee (“committee-on committees”), which oversees council and SRI’s governance. While the president remained the leader and the “face” of the society, all decisions must be discussed and approved by the executive committee, consisting of the president, immediate-past president, president-elect, and president-nominee. We revised the bylaws and updated all processes related to committee selection, function, term limits, reporting system, budget review and assignment of administrative support.
Key discussions and activities over the year focused on the international nature of SRI. With our growing worldwide representation and aspirations, it has become evident that SRI should not be a North American society. We have therefore agreed to hold international meetings every 4 years instead of every 5 years, to continue promotion of satellite meetings, to ensure the representation of international members among all elected officials, and to create a new grant that targets only international trainees, matching the existing model for RSDP support, which is limited to trainees from the United States.
We initiated intense discussions on diversity within our society. This critically important cornerstone of our scientific community goes beyond gender and ethnic groups, and includes elements related to academic training, areas of investigation, age, and the like. Intense council discussions led us to seek external professional advice and allocate funds to support an assessment of diversity within SRI and the provision of instructive sessions to our membership.
While the centerpiece of SRI’s activities is the annual meeting, it has become clear that we can do more for our members in-between meetings, thus raising the value of SRI and the engagement of the membership. We deployed several activities that are independent of the annual meeting. These included additional training and travel grants, and the creation of a “mentor on a cloud” as an international-level, virtual advisor for junior scholars. We have bolstered our communication efforts with the initiation of the SRI-365 on-line communication tool, and the more prevalent use of tweets not only by SRI’s administrative office, but also directly by the (SRI) president. Notably, the pace of increase of tweeter followers of the SRI president (8-fold) exceeded that of the other president during the same period.
Our meeting was titled “D2D: Data to Discovery”, with plenary presentations by Steve Quake, Suchi Saria, and David Haig. As the discipline of OBGYN and reproductive sciences is transforming from one in a series of biomedical fields to one that captures early human development, the origin of long term human health and a central component of gender-based precision medicine, our investigations assume broader implications to humankind. This should inspire SRI to consider a far-reaching role in biomedical research and training of future scholars.
To minimize formalities and create an atmosphere that is more conducive to direct, casual interactions, attendees at the Orlando meeting were advised to attend the meeting wearing jeans and t-shirts, and ties were highly discouraged. Indeed, the 2016-2017 president was not seen wearing a tie at any time during the meeting. We also created banner-free name badges.
In discussions with Fred Naftolin and other past SRI presidents, it has become clear that we should further engage past presidents in all of the SRI’s activities. We have improved our communication with past presidents with regard to all activities, invited past presidents to the “connection corners” sessions with trainees, and included past presidents in moderating sessions. Lastly, I was inspired by Larry Longo’s commitment to documenting the history of SRI. Larry, who passed away at the end of 2015, documented the history of SRI from the beginning till 1983. To continue his remarkable effort, we have decided to approach each past president now and in the future, and ask each to briefly reflect on their presidency year. This document will hopefully sustain itself indefinitely and provide a living document of SRI’s history.