Abstract
“Flexibility is indeed a quality inherent to organizations that survive the decades, or even better, excel over time.”
As your new President, I pledge to preserve and build upon our association's recent achievements: excellent educational programs, the journal JALA, and well-received conferences.
The next decade promises accelerated integration of laboratory science and technologies. It certainly promises as well more business and service challenges for organizations such as ours—a non-profit 501(c)3 scientific association.
With this in mind, your Board of Directors has worked hard this past year to invoke change. These changes have been communicated at our 2003 conferences and in JALA. Flexibility is indeed a quality inherent to organizations that survive the decades or, even better, excel over time. ALA will continue on its change path during my tenure as President. With you, members and committees, our staff, and the Board working together as a single team, we can undoubtedly deal with new challenges and continue to grow and improve.
As you know, we have recently reconstructed our professional services team to manage our association. Greg Dummer, our Chief Administrative Executive (CAE), leads this group of experienced, focused professionals. This operational change is going to have a tremendous positive impact on this organization as long as you and the Board take full advantage of their expertise and service.
During 2004, the ALA Board and I will focus on the following:
Initiate a formal strategic planning process, culminating in the development and implementation of a continuous plan.
Align education content of conference scientific programs with technology and technology management needs across a number of industries, inclusive of, but not limited to, the biopharmaceutical, clinical, and agrochemical communities, e.g.:
Impact of laboratory technologies on later-stage optimization of therapeutic candidates.
Maximize exposure to applications.
Audit and align the educational programming of our short courses, thereby optimizing our portfolio of offerings.
Continue to strengthen the Journal of the Association for Laboratory Automation (JALA):
Increase submission rate of high-quality articles.
Enhance our already stringent expert review.
Establish strategic alliances with a selection of relevant scientific and technical societies.
Expand ALA's membership base in size and scope.
Increase utilization of ALA's 11 standing committees.
Finally, a special thanks to Tony Beugelsdijk, Ph.D., M.B.A., Los Alamos National Laboratory, and David Herold, M.D., Ph.D., VASDHS/UCSD. Over the past year, Tony has taken untold time to educate me on the finer points of our association, its history, and its potential for the future. Tony and Dave absolutely embody the ideal of true volunteers. Special cheers to you Tony and Dave … and, don't go far—we need your involvement in ALA committees.
Kind regards,
Peter Grandsard, Ph.D.
ALA President
Amgen, Inc.