Education Council Update

John R. Dimar, MD
Education Council Chair

The Education Council Chair is responsible for the coordination of the affairs of 12 committees that are integral to planning and presentation of the Scoliosis Research Society’s annual educational activities.These activities are then regularly presented to the Presidential Line (PL), who offer their expertise and guidance to the council chair to convey to the committee chairs. The committees recently met at the annual October SRS Cabinet Meeting in Chicago, IL and are embarking on next year’s regular responsibilities and many new exciting endeavors.

To highlight the activities of a few of the committees, the IMAST Committee, co-chaired by Ronald Lehman, MD and Henry Halm, MD continues to work on improving the educational experience for next year’s meeting in Cape Town, South Africa in July 2017.  The Education Committee, chaired by Praveen Mummaneni, MD, has already convened to plan the educational program for the SRS Annual Meeting & Course in Philadelphia, PA for September 2017.  The Program Committee, led by Muharrem Yazici, MD is actively planning next year’s scientific program for the Annual Meeting and will be instituting new innovative paper presentation opportunities for the abstract submissions. 

The Worldwide Course Committee, now chaired by Benny Dahl, MD, PhD continues to interface with international spines societies to plan collaborative educational activities in addition to a new initiative in planning the SRS Current Concepts in Spine Deformity Course, in cooperation with EUROSPINE, which will be held in Paruge in March 2017.

The Website committee, now chaired by Todd Milbrandt, MD, MS continues to refine and update the electronic platform of SRS with many new visual media additions.  A new and exciting mission has been undertaken by the establishment of a core curriculum task force led Laurel Blakemore, MD that has recently completed the second important round of the Delphi Process necessary to advance the critical SRS effort to develop our core curriculum on spinal deformity. 

Finally, the remaining committee chairs and members are diligently working hard to improve all aspects of the SRS educational related activities in an effort to provide the finest educational platform in spine and will be reporting their individual committee activities in upcoming newsletters.