Building a World-class Physiology Meeting

In July, our member leaders met at our first Leadership Summit and Council meeting at the Lansdowne Resort in Virginia. More than 50 Council members, section and committee chairs, trainee representatives and select APS staff attended the three-day meeting. On day one, the group discussion centered around setting priorities for the next few years at the Society, including how we will grow our membership, increase our global footprint and provide the most value to our members.

Day two was focused on one topic: how to create a world-class physiology meeting. The group discussed what a world-class physiology meeting would look like. Several key elements and themes emerged. The meeting must:

• Be built on scientific excellence.
  • Engage the entire APS membership and the global physiology community.
  • Provide an exceptional, “must-attend” experience that attracts scientists from all career levels.
  • Raise the awareness and stature of the discipline of physiology.
  • Be financially viable, supporting the mission and growth of the Society into the future.

On day three, the APS Council made a momentous and unanimous decision to create a new stand-alone annual meeting, leaving the Experimental Biology (EB) meeting after 2022. Though creating a new meeting is an exciting opportunity, it also means that we will be ending our long-standing relationship with the EB meeting, a decision that was not taken lightly.

In December 2018, APS enlisted a consulting firm to evaluate member satisfaction with the current EB meeting and determine our members’ overall meeting preferences. The process included an extensive post-meeting survey, completed by more than 1,700 meeting attendees, along with focus groups and dozens of one-on-one interviews. They also performed a comparative analysis of EB and other similar scientific meetings.

The research found that while most students expressed high satisfaction with the meeting, satisfaction among non-student APS attendees was far lower than expected. More than 40 percent of non-student APS attendees rated their overall satisfaction with the meeting as three or below on a five-point scale. An even higher number rated the meeting poorly with regard to value, and around 65 percent of non-student attendees rated the meeting poorly when comparing value to cost. While most acknowledged that EB was a very good meeting for trainees, we were clearly not hitting our mark with other key audiences.

Summit participants first explored whether we could provide a world-class physiology meeting within the EB framework, but ultimately concluded that we would be better able to serve our members and the physiology community by developing an independent meeting.

Even with this commitment to strike out on our own, we are committed to making EB ’20, ’21 and ’22 exceptional meetings. In fact, Summit participants discussed how we might use the APS annual meeting at EB as a laboratory for testing ideas for our new meeting. Our intention is to make changes to the program and the event over the next three years that will both strengthen the quality of science and the overall experience.

The process to create our new annual meeting will begin in earnest this fall, with an expected launch in spring of 2023. APS President Meredith Hay, PhD, will be appointing and personally leading a diverse, representative planning task force. The talented APS staff will bring their many years of combined experience in meeting and event planning and professional service into this process every step of the way.

Together, our goal is to produce a global event where the entire physiology community can learn, collaborate and network. We look forward to sharing this world-class event with you.

This article was originally published in the September 2019 issue of The Physiologist Magazine.