President’s Corner #22: ISMRM Passes Gavel to New President Lawrence L. Wald, Ph.D.

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The International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM) concluded its Annual Meeting in Montréal, Canada, with the passing of the presidential gavel on Wednesday, 15 May 2019, to Lawrence L. Wald, Ph.D., current professor of radiology at the A. A. Martinos Center, MGH, Charlestown, MA, USA.

“After the stimulating whirlwind of the annual meeting in Montréal, it’s a pleasure to return home and reflect a bit on that experience and the year ahead.  It is with honor and some trepidation that I begin my term serving as president of this Society and, together with you, continue the push to advance medicine through improved imaging,” said Lawrence L. Wald.

As president for the 2019-2020 term, Wald will continue to lead the charge of nurturing this diverse and close-knit MR community into the future.  Wald stated, “to quote the recently deceased physicist Murray Gell-Mann; “Our work is a delightful game.”  In Montréal, you could practically see the wheels turning as ideas were presented and dissected, approaches and applications debated, and plans put into place for implementation and testing.  This sequence underscores the importance of the underlying construction of our slightly unusual Society.  Our “soup-to-nuts” goal requires bridging diverse expertise and types of training, from the basic sciences and engineering, to the clinical sciences and clinical practice including the actual delivery of care.  That is why we are so careful to foster this complete spectrum of Ph.D.’s, M.D.’s and MR Technologists and Radiographers and cultivate collaboration between them.  I don’t know of many other organizations who operate with this bandwidth.

So, I am pleased to enter into another cycle of this “delightful game” and work with you to foster new ideas and collaborations. Join me in reaching out to potential new members and working to leverage the broad expertise in our community to extend our vision with MR.”