NOTES FROM THE PROGRAM CHAIR
On behalf of the ASHG Program Committee and the Board of Directors, I welcome you to the Society's 55th annual meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah. I attended my first ASHG meeting as a medical genetics fellow in 1989, and I have attended these meetings annually ever since. I joined the Program Committee in 2003 and that gave me an appreciation of the complexity of designing the program and the efforts of many people who try to improve the scientific content each year.
Planning for the Salt Lake City meeting began even prior to the 2004 meeting in Toronto. The location of the meeting was chosen about ten years earlier. About a year prior to the meeting, solicitation began for the invited sessions. For the 2005 meeting, the Program Committee received over 85 proposals for invited sessions, nearly as high as the record number of proposals submitted for the meeting last year. These proposals underwent four rounds of review with final selections occurring in January. While there were many excellent proposals, final selections also took the overall balance of topics into consideration.
The Program Committee consists of 15 appointed members, who represent expertise in each of the 18 topics that are presented at the annual meeting. The 18 topics are as follows: Cancer Cytogenetics; Cancer Genetics; Clinical Genetics, Malformations and Dysmorphology; Cytogenetics; Development; Epigenetics; Ethical, Legal and Social Issues in Genetics; Evolutionary and Population Genetics; Gene Structure and Function; Genetic Counseling and Clinical Testing; Genomics; Mapping, Linkage and Linkage Disequilibrium; Metabolic Disorders; Molecular Basis of Disorders with Complex Inheritance; Molecular Basis of Mendelian Disorders; Prenatal and Perinatal Genetics; Statistical Genetics and Genetic Epidemiology; and Therapy for Genetic Disorders. One goal of the Committee is to maintain a balance of these topics in the overall scientific program while also stressing the theme of the meeting.
What happens to my abstract after submission?
Based upon your topic preference, your abstract is initially reviewed by the Committee member responsible for that topic. If the abstract might be more appropriately reviewed by reviewers in another topic, it may be transferred to that topic. The newly instituted sub-topic designations are also helpful in assigning abstracts to a final topic for review. Abstracts were sent to three reviewers who are experts in that area. Each reviewer assigned a score from 1 (highest priority) to 8 for each abstract, with the best possible aggregate score being 3. The number of available oral presentations in a given topic is in direct proportion to the number of abstracts submitted for that topic.
Abstracts selected for oral presentation received scores approximately within the top 10% of each topic. The top scoring abstracts from each topic were considered by the Program Committee to make up the plenary session. In addition, the Program Committee reviewed the top scoring abstracts in all topics to create multi-disciplinary oral sessions. The multi-disciplinary or "cross-topic" oral sessions are meant to bring investigators from diverse specialties together and have been well received since their inception. These sessions have been well attended, and a survey of the membership indicated strong support for continuing the multi-disciplinary sessions.
What is new in the 2005 program?
This year the program differs from that of previous years in several distinctive ways. First, this year the Program Committee has rewritten the abstract topics and instituted sub-topic designations that will allow us to more precisely pinpoint the thrust of your work when submitting an abstract, so that we can better group abstracts for presentation in plenary and poster sessions. Second, the Program Committee has decided to continue with the increased number of plenary presentations, given their high quality in recent years. Third, based on the success of the special workshop focused on helping both trainees and established investigators navigate and learn about the NIH peer review process, we will again have a mock study section session. Fourth, a new historical plenary session has been included in the program during the last day of the meeting. Finally, our president, Dr. Peter Byers, has organized a special symposium entitled, "Genetics and Genomics in the Public Eye."
In recent years, the Program Committee has developed a theme for each year's meeting. This year's focus is "Realizing the Promise of the Human Genome Project," a theme that broadly relates to the diverse specialties of our Society. Virtually all of the Social Issues and Education Sessions on the first day of the meeting and the Invited Speaker Sessions on the first two days are relevant to this theme. In what promises to be an exciting last day of the meeting and in keeping with the theme, we will have a special historical session, "Origins of the Genome Project," and a Distinguished Speakers' Symposium. These sessions should underscore the impact of the Human Genome Project on the practice of clinical genetics, the pathogenesis of Mendelian disorders, and the identification of susceptibility genes for common and complex traits.
Provide feedback to the Program Committee.
Each year the Program Committee strives to make the annual meeting more informative and enjoyable. We can better address your educational and scientific needs if you fill out your evaluation forms and/or contact members of the Program Committee. We will continue to use the online survey after the meeting to address whether the format and changes in this year's program were successful and useful for attendees. In addition, we encourage you to propose education workshops and symposia for the 2006 meeting. Information on submitting 2006 invited session proposals is included in the back of this book. Enjoy the meeting!
Anthony Wynshaw-Boris, M.D., Ph.D.
2005 Chair, Program Committee
