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Expanding Our Home: New Ways to Connect in the ISMRM
As I mentioned in my closing remarks in Hawaii, the ISMRM is a true home for our members. In a lot of cases, this goes beyond just scientific presentations and discussions to include true lifelong friends who are almost like family. (I would certainly rather be with you than some of my family…but that’s a story for another day!) I don’t want to sound trite, but at the end of the day, the only thing that makes our society work is people interacting with each other. When you come to the annual meeting or publish in one of our journals, you may be hoping to change someone’s practice based on studies that you’ve done. At the same time, you might also be influenced by someone else to change your practice or to think about your work in different ways. Over the 30 years that I’ve been a part of the ISMRM, I’ve seen this happen more times than I can count, and millions of patients globally have benefited from the connections we make. Over the next year, we hope to expand this even more.
As our AMPC chair, Katy Keenan, mentioned in her earlier blog post, the Sunday of the annual meeting will be an entire day focused on our 38 study groups. Through this day, you will have the opportunity to connect with people working directly in your field, or to even find new communities and connections beyond your current network. We’re hoping that these connections persist throughout the week and even after when you’re back at home.
Over the coming weeks, you will be seeing the launch of three other initiatives to further strengthen our ability to connect within the society and to the global community beyond the ISMRM. The first initiative will be the launch of our new member community based on a platform called Higher Logic. Think of it as a professional combination of a social network and a real-time messaging system, built just for us. This will replace all of the existing listservs and other fragmented community places within the ISMRM, consolidating our conversations into one central place. As you can imagine, study groups and other existing groups should automatically find their communities in the new platform, but as the year progresses, we fully expect to see new member-initiated groups appear within the platform. We hope that this will be your nexus for all things ISMRM.
Second, on 01 October, we will open the submissions for the 2026 annual meeting in Cape Town using a new ISMRM-based submission platform. The experience should be very similar to previous years from an author point of view. While you may not feel much of an immediate change, we hope that this system will provide a significant improvement in our ability to generate high-quality meetings and materials. Over time, our hope is that we can support more chances to connect across the community at workshops and annual meetings.
Finally, we are opening a new window to the world with a redesigned website. Our new digital home is cleaner, more modern, and built on a foundation that will serve us far into the future. This should be a place where you can more easily find stories about our research, stories about our people, and resources to improve your work. In particular, one of our goals is to provide a place for us to communicate with the global community outside of the ISMRM. MRI is such an important part of healthcare, and yet we haven’t had a real way to connect with everyday patients and providers in the past. The new website will be an important component of a broader strategy to highlight the amazing work that you all do. This is all the more important given the current global situation, which I will be talking more about in the coming months.
I hope that you will become an active participant in each of these initiatives! As always, if you have other ideas how we can bring people together, let us know. We also just got back from our site visit to Cape Town, and I couldn’t be more excited about holding our annual meeting there! You’ll be hearing from both Katy and me about our experiences there in the coming weeks. (I took over 80GB of video…so I have some editing to do!) Keep an eye out for those posts in the coming weeks.
Mark A. Griswold, Ph.D.
2025-2026 ISMRM President
