President's Message

Paul D. Sponseller, MD, MBA
SRS President 2019-2020

As COVID19 has turned our worlds sideways, so it has for SRS. All of our staff have transitioned to ​readily provide full support remotely. You can read about the efforts of our energetic Society in these pages.

We have had to re-evaluate all of our meetings. The two Hands-On Courses, planned for Nijmegen and Singapore, have been moved to ​2021 in the same locations.

IMAST will kick off ​virtually, on July 10-11 with top sessions on each of these days, so register (NO COST unless CME desired) and mark your schedules to attend these sessions. After this, groups of presentations ​will be sent to attendees each week in 20-30 minute sessions, which should be easy to fit into your schedule. Thanks to IMAST chairs, Han Jo Kim, David Skaggs, Ahmet Alanay, and Henry Halm for their work on this.

As you all know, the Board has recently made the very difficult decision to move the SRS Annual Meeting fully virtual. There will be several live sessions to attend, at a variety of times to accommodate our global membership. Please keep your calendars booked for September 9-13. The full agenda will be sent out and posted next week.

The SRS-OREF-POSNA collaborative grant on the Pediatric Spine received over ​28 applications and these have been reviewed and ranked. Two winners of these large grants will be announced before the Annual Meeting.

The first high-quality module in our new learning module, on the topic of EOS, has been completed under the leadership of Muharrem Yazici and a professional staff. Members put a great deal of thought and effort into creating a state-of-the art learning experience. A Task Force will work on other topics throughout the deformity spectrum in sequence.

Tressa Goulding has retired officially as our Executive Director, and the Board held a virtual gathering to wish her well in her retirement. Gifts were presented on behalf of the membership. We had planned to see her in Phoenix, but will now look forward to seeing her in St. Louis next year. Ashtin Neuschaefer is up to speed and capably leading the Society into our next era.

As the world transitions to the next phase of working alongside COVID19, please be safe, thankful for your chance to help others, and share your experiences with adapting care on our COVID blog.

Respectfully Yours,
Paul Sponseller