American Society For Nutrition

Seeking Your Ideas on How to Make ASN Relevant

By James Hill, ASN President

My goal during the coming year is to help ensure that ASN is a relevant organization. I see this as making it relevant for our members but also relevant to other scientists, to government policy makers, and to the public. We are well positioned to do this but I would love to start a dialogue with our members to talk about strategies and what we can accomplish through these strategies. Our Public Policy and Public Information committees are anxious to do more in this area and our staff person, Mary Lee Watts, provides exceptional leadership and support for these efforts. One way to become relevant is to be willing to comment on emerging (and often controversial) issues. I would like to see ASN as the “go to” organization for quick, accurate comment on nutritional issues. Sometimes we will have adequate time to prepare a response and sometimes we will need to act quickly. I believe we need a quick response team to deal with issues that require a rapid response. I understand that our response needs to be fast-paced and correct but I think we can take on this challenge. At the same time we need to be proactively working to generate interest in nutritional issues that we want to bring to the attention of the media and the public. I would love to hear your views on how to ensure that ASN is relevant.

Welcome to the ASN Blog!

Welcome to the ASN blog! As the society enters the 21st century with a redesigned website, it makes sense to launch one of today's most popular communication vehicles– the blog. This is where leaders and members of ASN will have the chance to write about any nutrition-related topic you choose. This is your blog, a place to respond to the issues that confront you every day.

To open, I would like to provide a brief update about the Society. The impact factors for our journals continue to rise, membership is increasing, our leadership remains active and engaged, and we recently launched a spokesperson program to raise our profile with the media. A strategic planning process is taking place, and we are well on our way to a successful 2008.

In light of the positive movements at ASN, I want to continue to solicit recommendations for improvement. How do we balance support of the entire field of nutrition, and still provide you, members of the society, with the specific resources you need? I would like to open this dialogue to encourage communication between all interested people. I don't expect this conversation to produce a final report or product, but to be a catalyst for real communication that grows over time.

ASN is committed to creating new opportunities for member engagement and we want to hear from you. Let us know if you have a topic you want to write about and we will assist you in posting it to the blog. We welcome comments from experiences through attending a conference, mentoring a student, or traveling abroad for nutrition education or charity work.