President's Report 2004-05
Southwest Chapter, AMWA

Membership

Chapter membership is 234 as of August 2004.

Finances

The chapter has a balanced budget and a healthy financial reserve.

Developments

• In April 2004, the chapter held its third miniconference at the Texas Medical Center in Houston. The conference was a success, attracting about 70 participants, including 15 or so attendees from out of town. In addition to the workshops, a lunchtime plenary lecture was led by Richard Gibbs, PhD, director of the Genome Sequencing Center at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. We plan to hold a chapter miniconference every two years. Therefore, our next miniconference is being planned for early 2006.
• In an effort to more effectively communicate with all of our chapter members, we are using our e-mail “amwasouthwest” Yahoo! Group to deliver all chapter announcements, updates, job postings, and the chapter newsletter. This initiative enables us to reach more of our members as large, bulk e-mails are becoming more difficult to send without being treated as spam. The distribution process also is more streamlined. Our publicity and membership chair, David Galloway, also serves as the e-Group moderator.
• All chapter officers elected for 2005–2006 will receive written instruction packets outlining the duties associated with their position; contact information and other supporting materials needed by each officer will also be included. These materials, which are designed to be maintained and updated by each officer during the chapter year and then given to the successor at the start of the new chapter year, will be distributed after the elections of chapter officers in May 2005.
• The chapter is researching ways in which we can provide more educationally oriented activities to the community. Among the options being considered are a writing competition at the high school level and booths at fairs at the graduate school level. In addition, we are looking into purchasing Health Literacy Toolkits from the AMA Foundation to donate to local libraries and schools. 

Programs

July 31, 2004; Clear Lake, Texas
Summer Meeting. Charles Lloyd, PharmD, the program manager for the NASA Bioastronautics Education and Outreach Program, was the guest speaker at our annual summer meeting. Dr. Lloyd shared his knowledge about the future of manned exploration of space and discussed his views on where space research is headed in the future and what role science writers will play in the process. About 25 people attended.

October 6, 2004, Houston, Texas
Historical Research Center. Attendees will be given a tour and a brief presentation of the Historical Research Center’s facilities and its collections. In addition, Dr. William Keller with the University of Houston and Dr. Bryant Boutwell with The University of Texas Medical School, two local authors who have used the Historical Research Center for recent projects, will also speak.

December 2004, Houston, Texas
Holiday Gala. This year’s holiday meeting will feature a speaker from Baylor who will look at the potential conflicts of interest between medical writers and physicians.

January 26, 2005, Houston, Texas
Annual John P. McGovern Award Banquet. This year’s McGovern Award will be presented to Alan Blum, MD, Professor and Gerald Leon Wallace Endowed Chair in Family Medicine and Director of the Center for the Study of Tobacco and Society at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.

March 2005, Houston, Texas
Membership Appreciation Event. The venue and speaker for the spring meeting is still being determined.

May 2005, Houston, Texas
Sixth Annual Career Roundtables. This popular annual meeting will feature three to four career roundtable discussions, with each discussion led by a chapter member or guest with a specific area of expertise.

Scholarship Program

The chapter is in the fifth year of its scholarship program, designed to encourage a promising graduate or undergraduate student in the field of medical communication. Participants are required to submit a 500-word essay that will be judged by a panel of AMWA chapter officers. The winner receives a check for $500, a 1-year student membership in AMWA, the publication of the winning essay in the Southwest Chapter Newsletter, and an invitation to the chapter’s annual career roundtables meeting in May.

Respectfully submitted,

Natasha Calder
Chapter President