GSA President Jeannie Lee announces a new Strategic Plan for GSA.

When I became President earlier this year, I set out with two major goals in mind for the Society in 2018:  (1) To establish a new Strategic Plan that would map out a vibrant 5-10 year future for our community that includes scholarship, support for geneticists at all career stages, public engagement, and advocacy; and (2) to set us on a course for long-term fiscal sustainability in order to reach our ambitious goals.  

More than ever, science depends on teamwork. That extends to scientific societies — just like a lab, a Society is a collaborative effort that succeeds or fails on the hard work and ingenuity of its members. During my year as GSA President, I asked you all for help in setting new strategic directions. After all, it’s your Society. I couldn’t be more delighted at the response, which drew contributions from a huge number of participants, including strategic plan working groups, “Blue Sky” meeting participants, committee members, Board members, and staff, not to mention the thousands of you who responded to a plethora of community surveys. Following the Blue Sky meeting and analysis of the community surveys, we convened a number of Working Groups to study each of the “Strategic Pillars” created in response to the community’s participation and to make recommendations to the Board.

The Working Groups have done an outstanding job and I would like to give special recognition to each of the members, who provided creative ideas and showed spectacular commitment to the planning process. Listed below, these volunteers included many from our Early Career Scientist Committees, as well as Board members, GSA journal authors, conference attendees, and others from our community. These groups met remotely, discussed and researched their topics, and produced reports to support Board deliberations in record time. Thank you, and we hope to engage you all in the future plans that will grow from your suggestions.

Thanks in part to the Working Group reports and excellent ideas from the Blue Sky participants, our Board of Directors meeting last week was incredibly positive. We feel energized not only by the community support but by the big challenges we face and the even bigger possibilities in front of us. In this spirit, the Board ratified the eight Strategic Pillars upon which the Strategic Plan over the next 5–10 years will be built. These pillars both build on our existing strengths and align our efforts with aspirational goals for the future:

• Support the  professional development of our members, including at early and mid-career stages, and across all sectors of the workforce
• Advance science through scholarly peer review and high-quality publishing
• Connect and encourage collaboration between scientists through hosting conferences
• Foster a diverse and inclusive international community of scientists
• Serve as an authoritative voice of the genetics community
• Advocate for science and scientists, including informing the public and legislators about the value of research from the genetics community
• Support the genetics community in engaging and communicating with the public
• Ensure fiscal sustainability of the Society and its programs

Thus, I am happy to report that we have largely accomplished the goals for 2018. In 2019, we will begin to flesh out details of the Strategic Plan with more support from our deeply engaged community.  We have also identified a new approach for long-term fiscal sustainability in order to grow these Pillars, and have begun to implement the fundraising strategy that includes not only continued membership support but also sponsorship from industry and focused investors. The buzz around The Allied Genetics Conference in 2020 will be a focal point for our membership and the Board’s continued work on the Strategic Plan. I am enthusiastic about continuing to serve on the GSA Board and its Executive Committee in the coming year and look forward to working with the incoming President, Terry Magnuson, and Vice-President, Denise Montell. It has been an enormous pleasure for me to serve as President, and I want to thank each and every one of you for helping to shape an exciting future for the Society.  

Strategic Planning Working Groups:

Advocacy

Chair: Erika Matunis (Johns Hopkins School of Medicine)

Lacy Barton (New York University)

Clement Chow (University of Utah)

Mete Civelek (University of Virginia)

Giovanna Collu (Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai)

Martin Ferris (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

Emily Lescak (Alaska Department of Fish and Game)

Victoria McGovern (Burroughs Wellcome Fund)

Jordan Ward (University of California, Santa Cruz)

Career Development

Chair: JoAnne Engebrecht (University of California, Davis)

Jeremy Berg (Columbia University)

Lex Flagel (Bayer Crop Science)

Rewatee Gokhale (Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai)

Kayla Capper (23andMe)

Buck Samuel (Baylor College of Medicine)

Didem Sarikaya (University of California, Davis)

Community, Conferences, and Journals

Chair: Kirsten Bomblies (John Innes Centre)

Rebecca Burdine (Princeton University)

Tamara Caspary (Emory University)

Aleeza Gerstein (University of Manitoba)

Matthew Hahn (Indiana University)

Tim Mosca (Jefferson University)

Katie Peichel (University of Bern)

Faten Taki (Weill Cornell Medicine)

Rob Unckless (University of Kansas)

Fiscal Sustainability

Chair: Jef Boeke (NYU Langone Medical Center)

Kent Anderson (Redlink / Caldera Publishing Solutions)

Joe Heitman (Duke University)

Andrew Kern (University of Oregon)

Kevin Lee (Grace Science Foundation)

Hunt Willard (Geisinger National Precision Health)

Mariana Wolfner (Cornell University)

Public Communication and Engagement

Chair: Arash Bashirullah (University of Wisconsin–Madison)

Mónica Feliú-Mójer (iBiology / CienciaPR)

Marnie Gelbart (Personal Genetics Education Project, Harvard Medical School)

Stephanie Mohr (DRSC/TRiP-FGR / Harvard University)

Damien O’Halloran (George Washington University)

Andreas Prokop (University of Manchester)

Cathy Savage-Dunn (City University of New York)

Ahna Skop (University of Wisconsin–Madison)

Jessica Velez (University of Tennessee Knoxville/Oak Ridge National Laboratory)

Turning vision into reality takes work—that much is obvious. But anyone who has written a proposal of any sort will realize that a coherent vision doesn’t appear out of thin air. It must be carefully crafted from an initial collection of goals, ideas, and ideals. This year, GSA’s staff, leadership, and membership are working hard together to reimagine the Society and hone a vision for the coming years. Following the productive brainstorming at our Blue Sky Meeting in May, the GSA Board of Directors met in June to begin turning the vision into reality.

An essential part of that strategic planning process is understanding the needs of our community. Our survey of nearly a thousand scientists and the Blue Sky participants taught us a lot about what you’re concerned about and how you think GSA can help. Despite the diversity of viewpoints and situations, there were three concerns shared by a large majority of participants, regardless of career stage: research funding, the current political landscape, and the public’s value of science. Among other insights, the survey also painted a picture of a pressure-cooker atmosphere among students and postdocs. This is perhaps reflected most starkly in the fact around a third are extremely concerned about their mental health.

Although this might all sound depressing, we know there are good reasons why people keep working despite these concerns. To get at some of the positives, we asked what excites you most about your work. Most of you—a diverse group—gave a small set of related reasons: you are most excited about learning, discovering, sharing, collaborating, improving lives, finding disease treatments, developing tools, conserving the environment, mentoring, and training.

As scientists, those experiences motivate us, too, and push us to find new ways to support our community. To gather some ideas, we asked what you thought were the most important ways a scientific society like GSA could serve you. The replies spanned a huge range, but in general they dovetailed closely with the ideas that emerged from our Blue Sky Meeting in May. The most common suggestions were:

• Advocate for science and scientists to policymakers;
• Help communicate and defend science to the public and policymakers;
• Promote basic research and the applications of genetics;
• Organize conferences and publish journals;
• Provide professional development, including for non-academic jobs; mentoring resources and job search help;
• Provide networking opportunities and creative ways for scientists to interact;
• Offer travel grants to attend conferences;
• Promote diversity and inclusion in our field.

To codify and prioritize these ideas in the context of a larger GSA vision, we dedicated most of the Board of Directors meeting in June to discussing the path forward. We are now forming working groups to help us create a strategic framework and gather more data to inform it. Although we won’t have the completed framework until the next Board meeting in December, there were a few highlights from our conversation that I think are worth sharing now:

1. GSA’s new Early Career Scientist programs, led by Director of Engagement and Development Sonia Hall, have been highly successful and fulfill a clear community need. These include the Early Career Scientist Leadership and Professional Development Program, the GENETICS Peer Review Training Program, New Faculty Forum, poster viewing invitation initiative, and more.
2. There is also interest in programs supporting members in mid- and late- career stages. There was particular concern about the funding difficulties of mid-career researchers, but also discussion of ways for retirees to remain engaged with the community.
3. Building on the hard work of our Early Career Scientist Diversity Subcommittee, we are forming a regular committee dedicated to researching and implementing meaningful diversity and inclusion initiatives.
4. We are revising our conference code of conduct and investigating best practice in this area.
5. We are forming a Conference Childcare Committee to ensure caregivers are supported at GSA Conferences.
6. We need to find new ways to empower our members to join in with our advocacy efforts, to engage effectively with the public and policymakers, and communicate the value of their research.
7. GSA needs funding to implement the new vision and ensure its programs remain financially viable.  We are therefore currently drafting plans to expand fundraising efforts within the society.
8. Last but not least, we believe that GSA should represent all of genetics and will thus be working to strengthen the representation not only of experimental organisms (the traditional “model organisms”) but also of agricultural species and species of ecological value.

Clearly, there’s a lot to do! I’m looking forward to the next half year to codify these principles and begin constructing the path to a sustainable GSA that will represent and advocate for all geneticists at all stages of their careers.

As scientists, we do a lot of talking. Whether presenting at conferences, engaging during meetings, or discussing the latest results with lab members—there is a lot to talk about! But it is at least as important to make time for listening in order to keep pace with scientific advances and to take the pulse of a community.

Taking the time to listen is doubly critical in times of change and especially important for the President of a large society. That is why I and the rest of the GSA Board of Directors kicked off our new strategic planning initiative by stopping to listen to you — members of our community.

In just one week, we received over 900 responses to our community survey, which gathered input on the major challenges you face, what you are excited about, and how our science is intersecting with society at large. We heard from faculty, students, postdocs, research scientists, visiting scholars, professors emeritus, technicians, academic advisors, educators, database curators, adjuncts, and group leaders, among others. Respondents hailed from more than 40 different countries, use approaches ranging from molecular genetics to evolutionary genetics, and study hundreds of organisms, from Aspergillus to zebrafish. Crucially, you talked about a wide range of challenges and concerns, and the aggregate data is starting to reveal some fascinating trends.

This fantastic response helped us bring your voices straight into the recent “Blue Sky” meeting, where 20 key opinion leaders representing various GSA communities and interests spent a productive day and a half brainstorming ideas and dreaming up critical new directions for our Society. It was enormously exciting and rewarding to spend the day in discussion and contemplation with such passionate and thoughtful people.  Their ideas and yours will now form the basis of a blueprint for the GSA’s 5–10 year Strategic Plan.

Of course, channeling all the new energy and Blue Sky thinking into concrete plans and executing them will be challenging. This week, we will be taking the results of the Blue Sky meeting and community survey to the Board of Directors to start formulating a strategic framework. To keep you abreast of developments, I will be posting a summary of the Board conversation in the coming weeks.

Lastly, even as we begin formulating a strategy, the listening will continue. Making our goals a reality will require more research and analysis over the coming year, including additional topic-specific surveys and in-depth interviews. Watch out for more chances to shape GSA’s future direction and feel free to send me your thoughts and ideas any time at society@genetics-gsa.org!

GSA President Jeannie Lee invites your input.

Like everything right now, science is changing fast. It seems like every time I look up from my work, the view has shifted, and the landscape is a little less familiar. This speed can be both exciting and disorienting, but either way, it pays to scan the horizon sometimes. As President of the GSA Board of Directors, I want to ensure the Society does exactly that.

The GSA Board, the GSA staff, and the many volunteers on our committees work hard to serve the genetics and model organism communities, but as is true for many organizations, most of the time we have our nose to the grindstone just to get things done—whether it’s the next issue of our journals, the next conference, the next travel award deadline, or the latest budget.

But if we’re to keep up with changing times to truly serve science, the Society must occasionally pause to ask some tough questions. Where are we going? Where should we be going? What does the future look like? How can we shape that future?

In this spirit, we have initiated a strategic planning process, the first step of which will be a “blue sky” meeting to come up with new ideas and dream up possible futures. Blue sky meetings encourage participants to think creatively while setting aside real-world barriers like time, cost, and politics.

The conversation will bring together a small group of stakeholders from both within and beyond GSA, including Prachee Avasthi (University of Kansas Medical Center), Giovanna Collu (Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai), Lynn Cooley (Yale University), Cassandra Extavour (Harvard University), Marnie Halpern (Carnegie Institution for Science), Mark Johnston (University of Colorado School of Medicine), Rob Kulathinal (Temple University), Erica Larschan (Brown University), Terry Magnuson (UNC Chapel Hill), Mark Peifer (UNC Chapel Hill), Buck Samuel (Baylor College of Medicine),  Jordan Ward (UC Santa Cruz), and Ting Wu (Harvard Medical School), among others to be announced soon.

To help this crucial first step of thinking big, we need input from you. We’d like to better understand what’s on your mind right now. What challenges are holding you and your science back? What are you most excited about for the future? How is our field impacting society?

We hope you’ll take the brief 10 minutes to fill in this survey. You’ll be entered into the drawing to win one of 40 $20 Amazon, Starbucks, or Worldwide Visa gift cards, and for every completed survey we’ll donate $1 to UNICEF and Partners in Health (up to $1000). We want to hear from all parts of the community, including students, postdocs, research scientists, faculty, industry researchers, and educators.

I think you’ll find it rewarding to take a break from your own daily tasks to look at the long view for a few minutes. It’s the only way to make sure we’re heading in the right direction.

Update, April 26, 2018: The survey is now closed, thank you for the fantastic response! If you have feedback or suggestions, send an e-mail to society@genetics-gsa.org.