Back from the AMWA Annual Conference

Greetings again. I just returned from the American Medical Writers Association (AMWA) annual conference, held October 22 through 24.

Different years, AMWA holds its annual conference is in different parts of the United States and Canada. This year, the conference was in Dallas, Texas—only about 170 miles (270 kilometers) from Texas A&M University, where I teach.

Because the conference was only 3 to 4 hours’ drive away, students could easily attend. I’m pleased that 10 students joined me.      

The students obtained useful information from the conference sessions. They also made good use of the chance to network (interact informally with people with similar professional interests).

Meanwhile, I kept busy at the conference. My activities including leading 2 breakfast roundtables and a dessert roundtable, presenting a 3-hour workshop, and moderating and speaking at a session. Fortunately, I still had some time left to attend other sessions.

The session I moderated was titled “Teaching International Authors: Some Trailblazing Initiatives”. It included 3 presentations.

The first presentation was “Scientific Writing Training for International Faculty and Fellows at a Cancer Center”, by Stephanie Deming, of the MD Anderson Cancer Center. The second was “Medical Writing and Editing in China: Development through Teaching”, by Zhang Jian and Dong Zhe, of Peking University Health Science Center.

The third presentation was “AuthorAID: Helping Developing-Country Researchers to Write and Publish”, by (you guessed it) Barbara Gastel. In case you’d like to see my presentation and handout, I’ve added them to the AuthorAID Resource Library.

But now, to try to catch up on my other work!