President’s Letter from Bill Steinbach – The Attending IDWeek Experience

Do you remember your first IDWeek? I recognize for some of us our inaugural experience was at a meeting with a different name but think back to that first one for you (whatever it was called). Do you recall what it meant to you to step into that sea of people who, like you, have dedicated their lives to this amazing field? What it was like to experience wave upon wave of innovative science shared by your peers? How it felt to weather that tempest and emerge rejuvenated and energized to take your own practice and career further than you had imagined?

As we prepare for this year’s meeting, which will be my 22nd, I recall what it’s like to experience IDWeek. While at other more general pediatric meetings you might search out the ID folks, or at a microbiology meeting you might scout some of the clinical ID people, or at ICAAC (now I am dating myself) you might pop into some of the more clinical management sessions beyond just the latest new drug development. But at this meeting, it is all there right in front of you and your mission is to instead pick which ultra-specific nuanced ID topic you wanted to learn more about and when.

Whether this is your first, second, 22nd, or you’ve been to all of them since 2012 (and the Annual Meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society of America that preceded “IDWeek”), I hope you are as thrilled to be in attendance as ever. Maybe in this past year you’ve progressed to the next stage of your career, or moved jobs, or published something exciting and you are eager to share it with your colleagues, all while still preparing for that next step or publication. Or, if you are incredibly fortunate, you are attending IDWeek for the very first time.

As we sit here with just over one month until we meet in Los Angeles, here are a few things I can’t wait to be part of at IDWeek 2024:

1. Seeing friends – People make the world go round, and we have some amazing people in our field and it is just plain fun to reconnect and talk and laugh with them;
2. PIDS Foundation Dinner – This has coalesced into the premier gathering at our field’s premier meeting and gets better and better each year. Buddy is hosting this year as the Foundation Chair, so who really knows what will happen. We might not get our security deposit back;
3. Annual Membership Meeting – Once upon a time this was called the PIDS “business meeting” and is transforming to a State of the Society meeting this year to showcase all we are doing and where we are headed.

Next month the largest professional meeting of infectious diseases experts in the world will convene, and PIDS is smack in the middle of it all. Some of you may recall that IDWeek itself was a rather heretical concept when it first began, linking multiple ID-related meetings into one larger smorgasbord. Clearly the experiment was a success.

I know many of you come back each and every year with new projects and new collaborations and more exciting things to do than ever before. We can’t wait to be together and share our triumphs, challenges, and collegiality. It is sure to be an IDWeek to remember.

See everyone in Los Angeles.