Bridget Lumb, President of The Physiological Society

https://doi.org/10.36866/pn.119.6

Membership is at the heart of The Society. Through publications and scientific conferences, we offer access to the latest science, and through workshops and grants we offer professional development to support your career.

Although in-person conferences and events will always be a key part of what we offer, the current pandemic has demonstrated that The Society can support many more people by increasing online provision.

We moved very quickly following lockdown to establish a series of online resources in our Covid-19 Hub. This included a programme of professional development webinars for our Members, focused on the topics you told us were important – such as dealing with mental health issues during this difficult time. Over the course of 10 weeks hundreds of Members took part on topics such as publishing for beginners and online networking.

We also took advantage of the flexibility software like Zoom offers to respond quickly to changing events. For example, we worked with Mike Tipton (University of Portsmouth, UK) to arrange a webinar on guidance to returning to the lab, setting it up within days of the government guidance being issued. This was tremendously successful, with over 650 people taking part from 33 countries – a truly international endeavour! 

This has shown The Society has the ideas and agility to respond quickly to changing events.

At the time of writing, our first complete virtual early career conference Future Physiology 2020 has drawn to a close. It has been a fantastic week of keynote talks, oral communications, panel discussions and poster presentations – all conducted in a virtual environment. We have had people join us, both as presenters and attendees, from across the world. The feedback on the science has been overwhelmingly positive, as has the response to the technology we used to host the conference. People could attend while sitting in their garden (even if the weather has not always been sunny!). And by programming it over the course of a week we enabled people to attend while also keeping on top of their day jobs.

The success of Future Physiology 2020 showed that online provision can increase the number and diversity of people that engage with and contribute to The Society. This can only be a good thing. Even when “normality” resumes, The Society cannot go back to offering solely physical events. 

As we plan for the future, we must be able to evolve and adapt to the needs of our Members to ensure that we remain relevant, including the development of new products and services that meet our Members’ changing needs.

This will include access to Member-only resources, such as professional development opportunities, and Member-only discussion groups.

In response to these changing times, Trustees took the decision at our June Council meeting to invest in developing a new online Member area of our website. This will be a secure section of the site where Members will be able to log in and will sit alongside the Member Portal which will still be used for booking events and updating your membership. This new Member area will enable us to expand our array of Member only materials such as webinars, practical guides and teaching resources. These will be exclusively for our growing community of Members. We are starting this work now and the new section will go live next year.

We also know that our Members want more networking opportunities – 88% of respondents to a Member survey we held in March told us this was a priority for them, with over half saying that networking with Members is currently difficult. Our new online Member area will seek to change that. We are working on an online community for Members, which we hope will become the home of physiologists on the web. 

Members will be able to discuss the latest research, share teaching resources and engage with Society Representatives. Each Theme will be represented too, enabling our cross-cutting communities to thrive.

This has been a challenging few months for us all and I know that many of us have concerns about research and teaching moving forward. The uncertainty is likely to be with us for some time yet – and The Society will continue to support our community through this.

The lockdown has also forced us to innovate and respond rapidly to new situations. As we move forward, The Society will take the positive lessons from this so that we become a more responsive, online Society catering for the needs of our Members.

All the best wishes for the future.