This is more than a meeting – it’s a moment for us to gather, strategize, and lead with purpose. Now more than ever, our collective voice matters.

This year’s Annual Meeting comes at a pivotal time for academic medicine and women’s health. Adding to the assault on reproductive justice since the Dobbs decision, we now face unprecedented threats to the very institutions we call home. With continued and accelerating threats to women’s health research, and the core of our focus to increase access and equitability, our program will focus on action, innovation, and advocacy. Join us for an update on research funding – what’s critical and how decisions are made at a national level. We will feature voices from the NIH, NASEM, and government. We will then hear from Dr. Jennifer Elisseff (Johns Hopkins) on advancing interdisciplinary discovery in ob/gyn to move our field forward. We’ll also explore how we can respond to the erosion of support for physician-scientists and early-career investigators.

We will then turn our discussion to urgent external and internal threats to academic medicine. We will lead this session with a talk about the financial implications of cuts in federal grant funding and other federal funds including Medicaid, along with strained state budgets and clinical competition that compromise our ability to balance budgets for AMCs. We will also discuss the growing influence of private equity. Internally, we have several deans, from different AMC models, who will discuss the conflicts that frequently arise between the goals of Academic Health Systems and Schools of Medicine.

And as AI rapidly reshapes our lives, leading experts will examine its implications for clinical practice, medical education, and research. Leaders in the field will discuss how to optimize AI as a tool, as well as, its pitfalls.