A Letter From the President

CIS President Carl June, MDDear Colleagues:

I am honored to serve as your new CIS President. Jonathan Braun is continuing as immediate Past President of CIS and Steve Holland is now serving as President Elect. There are currently 650 members, and 45 new members joined CIS last year. Please be sure to visit the WebBook of Biologics that Marc Natter has spearheaded. This recent feature has already captured 10% of the CIS website traffic. Our Journal, Clinical Immunology now has an impact factor of 3.6, and has had steadily increasing submissions over the recent years. Please activate your free online subscription. I am very grateful for the superb work done by Andrew Saxon, who continues to "grow" the journal as Editor-in-Chief.

I hope you were able to attend FOCIS 2009 in San Francisco, which was an exciting meeting that was co-sponsored by CIS. At FOCIS, CIS hosted two very successful satellites, as judged by "standing room only" attendance:

Please save the dates for the following major CIS activities in 2009-2010. Charlotte Cunningham-Rundles and Kathleen Sullivan are holding the Eighth Annual School in Primary Immunodeficiency Diseases on September 10-14, 2009 in Miami, where 32 fellows-in-training will be selected to participate and CIS will fund travel for all participants. George Tsokos held a School in Systemic Autoimmune Diseases this April, and he is organizing the next School in Systemic Autoimmune Diseases which will be held in Boston in 2010. Finally, Kathleen Sullivan and Charlotte Cunningham-Rundles are organizing the first national meeting dedicated to primary immunodeficiency. The PIDD National Conference will be held May 20-23, 2010 in Philadelphia. Stay tuned to the CIS web site for more information on this exciting event.

Finally, I am pleased to announce the CIS/Baxter Scholarship Program, made possible by a generous unrestricted educational grant from Baxter Biosciences. CIS will offer a $60,000 fellowship award and an $85,000 Junior Faculty Award in 2010. Information on the application process for these awards will be available on the CIS web site in October.

The CIS Council and I will be holding a strategic planning session this summer to consider how CIS can continue to best serve its membership during this unprecedented period of financial uncertainty and stimulus packages. If you have an idea for programming, the journal or the web site, or would like to volunteer to participate on a committee, Summer School or Satellite Symposium, please contact the CIS National Office at info@clinimmsoc.org. As CIS continues to grow and expand, the Council and I look forward to working with the CIS membership and I thank each of you for your participation in the Society.

Sincerely,

CIS President Carl June, MD

Carl June, MD
CIS President