Dear NNS Members

Happy New Year! As we pass our holiday season and embark on 2023, we have a number of exciting activities upcoming for our NNS members leading up to our 2023 meeting in Austin!

Our 2023 Virtual Roundtables are off to a great start. We had our first Presidential Roundtable on January 19th, discussing the new NIH Data Management and Sharing Policy from the NIH. The recording of this session is now available in the Members Only section of the Neurotrauma.org website, and features presentations and discussion from Drs. Lyn Jakeman, Nsini Umoh and Hibah Awwad of NIH, Cassie Myers of Drexel University, and Adam Ferguson, Abel Torres and Russel Huie of UCSF, speaking on the policy and how universities and individual researchers are responding to it. A lot of great resources, including NIH templates for the new Data Management Plan, and links to tutorials on how to upload data to some online repositories, are included. The roundtable had a great discussion from NNS members, and drew 55 participants. I am very grateful for our panelists, and I hope the NNS members found it useful!

Our next Roundtable, “I Have a PhD, Now What?”, is scheduled for February and will be hosted by our TEAM committee! Be on the lookout for the announcement coming soon!

Thanks to our Advocacy Committee, under the leadership of Dr. Grace Griesbach, NNS has joined the Steering Committee for the Concussion Awareness Now Campaign! With actress and comedienne celebrity sponsor Rebel Wilson, the campaigns founders (Abbott and the Brain Injury Association of America), and the other members of the steering committee, NNS is happy to work on Concussion Awareness – check out the website for more information: concussionawarenessnow.org.

Our 2023 Symposium is right around the corner! Co-chairs Drs. Courtney Robertson and Linda Noble with the program committee continue to work on planning a spectacular program for our event at the Marriott Austin Downtown in Austin, TX, from June 25-28th. Registration is open now, and early registration ends on March 17th, with abstracts due on March 3rd!

Planning for 2024 is already getting off the ground (see the photo below of Drs. Gene Gurkoff, 2024 Planning Committee Co-Chair, Adam Ferguson, Vice-President and President-elect, and Courtney Robertson, 2023 Planning Committee Chair, exploring hotel options for 2024).

I would like to close by once again thanking all the NNS members for their ongoing support of the Society. I’m excited to show you what we, the NNS Councilors and Officers and the ICS team, have to offer in 2023.

Best wishes

Kimberly Byrnes