We caught up with the American Thyroid Association (ATA) president Prof. Julie Ann Sosa, MD, MA, FACS (University of California, San Francisco, CA, USA) ahead of this year’s virtual meeting to highlight their ATA Centennial Celebration at their upcoming conference taking place in Washington, DC in 2023.
The 2023 American Thyroid Association Annual Meetings Centennial Celebration will be held in Washington, DC in September 27th to October 3rd, 2023.
Questions
- What are the priorities of the ATA for the coming year and what can we look forward to? (0:30)
- What can we expect from the 2023 ATA Annual Meeting in Washington, DC in September 2023? (5:17)
- What is the focus and theme of this year’s meeting? (9:03)
Disclosures: Julie Ann Sosa discloses grant/research support from Exelixis and Eli Lilly.
Support: Interview and filming supported by Touch Medical Media Ltd. Interview conducted by Shanice Allen.
Transcript
My name is Julie Ann Sosa, MD, MA, FACS. I have the great privilege of serving as the president of the American Thyroid Association. And this is a very special time, because I am the president who’s going to be allowed to help celebrate its 100th birthday.
What are the priorities of the ATA for the coming year and what can we look forward to? (0:30)
Celebrating your 100th birthday is a very big milestone. A centenarian is an incredible milestone and I think it gives the ATA the opportunity to look backwards and also and perhaps more importantly, look forwards. So over the coming year, I think we’re going to spend time celebrating the last 100 years and all of the contributions that the ATA and more importantly, its members have made to thyroidology at a national and really international level. I think it’s important when we look at history, though, that we use a lens that is both celebratory and critical and so when you look backwards, I think we’re not only going to celebrate positive milestones, but also use the lens that is critical and to look at opportunities that exist for the ATA in the present and the future and you could say what might one such opportunity be? I would say diversity, equity, inclusion and structural change. How can we make sure that our ATA community is as diverse and as inclusive as possible? Because I think if we are diverse and inclusive, we will be that much more spectacular and innovative going forward. Then I think we’re going to spend a lot of time at our birthday party thinking about the present and the future and I would say I always like looking forward more than I like looking backwards, why? Because you can change the future. You can control the future and so I think we’re going to focus looking forward at some of the things that we do really well and that are sort of mainstays of the American Thyroid Association and what rises to the top, guidelines. We have a number of guidelines, practice guidelines that are in process and at our annual meeting, we’re going to start debuting some of those guidelines in a preliminary fashion, and those include guidelines for adult patients with thyroid nodules, adult patients with differentiated thyroid cancer, thyroid disease in pregnancy and pediatric thyroid cancer. So guidelines will be a focus. I think we’re going to do some twists and look at some new areas for the American Thyroid Association. What might they be? Artificial intelligence? What is the appropriate role for artificial intelligence in the clinical management of patients with thyroid disease? And also, what is the role of AI in scholarship? We are going to have a session focused on social media. I think the last several years have really changed how we communicate with each other and how we communicate with patients and social media is here to stay. I think it’s a super double edged sword and so we’re going to be providing our members with some tip sheets on how to deploy social media in a positive way. Then another area and there are many, but I’m just highlighting a few. Another area is endocrine disruptors. So I think climate change is occurring everywhere. It is the result in many ways of things we do, stuff we make, and the way the climate and the world is changing around us impacts how the thyroid works and the health of the thyroid so we are going to be focusing on scholarship in that area. So three kind of cool things we’re going to do, although there are many others.
What can we expect from the 2023 ATA Annual Meeting in Washington, DC in September 2023? (5:17)
Our 100th birthday party is going to be in Washington, D.C., and I can’t think of a better place to celebrate 100th birthday than in our nation’s capital. I think there are going to be a lot of parts of our annual meeting that are favourites, they’re favourites every year, and you can count on them being there. One is our tumour boards and everyone loves to discuss cases, discuss them and argue with colleagues about how best to manage them. So things like our tumour boards are going to be there, but we’re going to be having historical lectures and lectures by award winners in our society. We’re going to be showcasing the very best science from our members developed over the last year. We’re going to do some new things. We’re going to change some things up. One is we’re going to increase opportunities for members to get together with other members in a way that is active and interactive so there’s going to be a lot of celebrating and partying and networking. We’re going to have networking for division chiefs and program directors so people can share, experience and borrow best practices. We are going to have something brand new, a leadership development board. So I think there has been no time, at least in my lifetime, where leadership has been more important than it is now and yet leadership could not be more difficult than it is now so we are developing a workshop, or course, to help those members who are interested in becoming leaders or becoming more effective leaders to train to do that. So stay tuned. A brand new leadership development course. Then we’re going to be focusing on women in thyroidology. Really, we’re going to be celebrating diversity, equity and inclusion. We’re going to have a women in thyroidology plenary session and we’ve invited an institute director from the National Institutes of Health to help lead that discussion. A lot of the formats are going to be different, you know, we’ve been doing lectures for 100 years. They’re good, they’re important but there are other ways to learn and those include more opportunities for questions, answers, fireside chats and discussions, and then, you know, some other topics. Endocrine disrupting chemicals. Guidelines, guidelines, guidelines. There are four sets of guidelines underway. We’re going to be focusing on the patients. I think right now we all understand the importance of putting the patients in the epi-centre of decision making around both benign and malignant endocrine diseases so we’re going to be talking about quality of life and survivorship from the patient perspective. So a lot of our traditional favourites, but a lot of new stuff coming.
What is the focus and theme of this year’s meeting? (9:03)
It’s a birthday party, and I don’t like going to my own birthday parties because I don’t like celebrating aging, or at least my own aging, but I love going to other people’s and other organizations, birthday parties. So this is our 100th birthday party, and it’s going to be a wonderful celebration. A lot of people think of the American Thyroid Association as a thing. You know, it’s like an organization but the ATA is not a brick and mortar structure. It is people, and so we hope that this meeting will be a celebration of the membership of the ATAs past, presence and our legacy, the future. We want to bring energy. We want to bring excitement. We want to bring innovation and creativity. So we’re going to look back, but we’re probably going to spend more time looking forward to the next 100 years.
Subtitles and transcript were auto-generated.
