01/2017

In January 2017, the CCHF held its YR4 Annual Conference, bringing together over 120 participants, including 19 CCHF faculty, 25 industrial affiliates, 10 NDCR members and student and postdoc representatives from all Center sites.

The meeting started on Thursday 19th January, with a Pharmaceutical Sciences Symposium, with speakers from the CCHF Industrial affiliates and External Advisory Board. These six talks, and the following poster session were very well attended. In the evening CCHF students had a professional development session, with the introductory Birkman Assessment, a technique to provide a greater level of self-awareness and relating to how you operate best in different team environments.

On Friday 20th, we had the full presentations from Center members, with an overview of recent scientific accomplishments, our broader impacts activities, a student and postdoc poster session and a panel discussion on maximizing our engagement with the CCHF industrial affiliates. In the evening we had a social event sampling some of the local favorites in Atlanta.

On Saturday 21st we started the day with a networking session for the student and postdoctoral members of the Center, who had the opportunity to ask questions of our industrial affiliates, to find out more about life as a research scientist in the industrial sector. During this time the Center faculty focused on a brainstorming session to consider our plan for the upcoming Site Visit. In the afternoon, we brought the whole Center together to make forward focused plans for our scientific research and define a number of near term and longer term goals to help guide our activities.

On Sunday morning we brought the team together to brainstorm our broader impacts engagement, consider some of our signature programs and discuss how to build upon the strong foundations we have made, maximize member engagement and use the feedback we have gathered to ensure that we are designing programming that speaks to our members needs.