Food Protection Trends - April 2010 - 208

from your president

“vickie's view”

reetings to all! It’s hard to believe, but I have passed the halfway mark of my term as IAFP President and it seems to have passed incredibly fast. Time is marked in all sorts of ways: hours, days, months, years, decades, centuries. My son Jack recently celebrated “100 Day” at school. I guess when you are a first-grader it is a major accomplishment to make it through 100 days of school! To commemorate this milestone, each student dressed up as a 100-year-old person. It was quite amusing to see a seven-yearold’s idea of what a 100-year-old man looks like! I wondered if Jack will look anything like that when he actually is 100 years old. I took pictures of him from the “100 Day” celebration, which I will share with Jack and his children. And when he is 100 years old, perhaps someone will make a collage to commemorate his life and include these pictures. The collage will be like a pictorial time capsule, giving his kids lots of amazing and humorous insight into Jack’s life and successes. IAFP will soon be commemorating its 100 years of existence and service to food protection. Our centennial anniversary will be celebrated at the IAFP 2011 Annual Meeting in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the site of the very first meeting of our organization. Imagine if IAFP members and leaders throughout the years had created a time capsule for us to open at next year’s 100-year anniversary celebration. What do you think we would find? What if we were to create one, starting at the 100-year mark, that the next generations of food safety professionals could view a century from now? What would you include in the capsule to help future members remember, recognize and celebrate where we are today and all the dedication and effort that today’s members put into sustaining and driving IAFP forward each and every day?

By VICKIE LEWANDOWSKI
PRESIDENT

“How would you like to see 100 years of success celebrated? ”

We have begun discussions on planning for the 100th Anniversary celebration. It certainly is not too early to begin thinking about what we will do; the event will be here sooner than we think. How would you like to see 100 years of success celebrated? If you have any ideas, time capsules included, please share them with any member of the Executive Board or IAFP staff. Speaking of planning, while Jack was planning for his 100th day celebration, I was away for a long weekend of just that at the Program Committee and Executive Board

meetings. The Program Committee met for two long days, planning the program for the 2010 Annual Meeting (August 1–4, 2010, Anaheim, CA). The process of planning the program is intense. For the 2010 meeting, the process actually started in November 2009. The call for symposia yielded a total of 77 submissions! The proposals were reviewed by each of the 12 committee members, who then came together via conference call and discussed each proposal over the course of a five-hour long call. Using the criteria defined in the Instructions to Authors, approximately 27 proposals were chosen for further development. The committee makes suggestions with respect to possible speakers, combining similar proposals, etc. in order to get a balanced program with a balance of international topics and speakers, as well as a balance from industry, academia and government. Those proposals are then resubmitted for a final review and decision at the winter meeting. The deadline for technical session abstracts is typically in January, and like the symposia submissions, there was a record number. This year, more than 600 abstracts were submitted, up from 465 submitted for the 2009 meeting. For this review, the committee of 12 is split into four teams of three members, with one academic, one industry and one government representative per team. The abstracts are divided among the teams based on subject matter and areas of expertise of the team members. Each person reviewed roughly 150 abstracts prior to coming to the meeting. Once at the meeting, the teams spend four hours discussing each abstract and then accept or reject each one based on the stringent criteria outlined in the Instructions to Authors. The rejected abstracts are then reviewed again by a team of seven different

208 FOOD PROTECTION TRENDS | APRIL 2010

Food Protection Trends - April 2010

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