2020 ANZSCDB
President’s message.

In a tumultuous year of staggering upheaval and sadness around the world, research, science, knowledge and medicine have come into sharp focus as the world confronts the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. The threat of infection has sent our world into lock-down, the reality of COVID 19 is devastating for many and too often fatal. Scientists and educators, like us, have a vital role to play in leading the world through this pandemic.

Our members are delivering healthcare, researching the SARS-CoV-2 virus, working on tests, vaccines and treatments, charting the virus spread through populations, deciphering susceptibilities, seeking to understand the many organ systems affected in COVID-19, generating the basic knowledge about cells and tissues to underpin these efforts and training new generations of scientists, medical professionals and many others who will be the future workforce to meet this and other challenges.  As part of the global scientific and biomedical workforce, we are rising to the call to help find solutions, in our ongoing research and endeavour, and for some, through urgently redirected efforts.

At the same time, many of our members are faced with closed laboratories, cancelled experiments, the challenge of adapting teaching and training regimes and the loss of funding, sustenance and jobs. Family situations further complicate lives and add to the stress of this unprecedented time. The challenges of this year are intense and the effects may be long lasting. We acknowledge the hardships many of our members are facing, and the Society is here, as a community, to offer its support and solidarity in the times ahead. This may be a point of change for many in research and teaching, perhaps for regrouping, changing course, relocating or seeking new opportunities. For students and early career researchers, it is profoundly important not to forsake your career aspirations and to seek ways to ride out these difficult times. Ask for help. I hope that such necessities do drive new partnerships, inspire inventions, facilitate translation and help us reimagine our research and career goals. I hope the Society can be with you in these journeys.

So, it is not a happy time, nor an easy time, to address the society, but it is a very important time for this Society and for our professions and our work.  Cell and developmental biology, in their many guises, have never been more important as a backdrop for discovery, medicine, innovation and solutions. The Society has a key role to play in bringing us all together, to foster ideas, help each other address complex problems and celebrate breakthroughs. It has a role to play in advocating for research and teaching in the face of dire funding cuts. And ANZSCDB definitely has a role to play in nurturing and sustaining the next generations of scientists and professionals who will forge the way ahead.

While most of our usual society activities are regrettably ‘on ice’, we will be hosting upcoming online committee and general meetings, our annual prize presentations and some member forums, as we slowly emerge from isolation. Indeed, our society is poised to thrive in an Australia and New Zealand ‘bubble’, as we remain sequestered in our island nations.

Stay tuned! I urge you all to stay in touch, or reconnect, as life begins, hopefully, to reawaken.

ANZSCDB President,

Professor Jennifer L. Stow
j.stow@imb.uq.edu.au