President’s Letter from Dr. C. Buddy Creech – Building a Resilient Society

Whether personal or professional, resilience is an admirable, invaluable trait. The cost of acquiring it, though, often exceeds what we had imagined. Resilience typically requires being challenged beyond what we thought was possible, developing endurance, resourcefulness, and character in the process.

As a society, PIDS is committed to building the infrastructure necessary to become the resilient, representative organization we aspire to be:

• We’re investing in summer experiences for students to increase our opportunities to recruit young talent into the field and nurture the expansion of our specialty;
• We continue to seek connections to fund research awards with charitable partners to ease the burden associated with research funding, particularly for fellows and young faculty;
• We’re offering 4 fellowship awards this year – the PIDS/St. Jude Fellowship, two Plotkin/Sanofi Pasteur Fellowships, and a newly developed fellowship award focused on reducing health disparities in infectious diseases (PIDS/Sanofi Health Disparities Research Award);
• And we recently hosted our first Inclusion, Diversity, Access, and Equity Grand Rounds, which focused on how we can improve recruitment and retention pathways for traditionally underrepresented in medicine populations.  

This is a sampling of our current efforts to develop the resilience required to confront the challenges ahead. I’m sure there will be growing pains as we launch initiatives and do the work needed to be the diverse, inclusive, and accessible society we demand of ourselves.

And it will be easy to slip into old patterns of maintaining a status quo, to tumble back onto the well-trodden path of least resistance. It will be then that each of us must find the endurance to spur one another on, to think creatively about how we can prove our capacity to grow as a society. We look expectantly towards the day when our society of physicians, advanced practice providers, pharmacists, research scientists, public health officers, and valued partners associated with Pediatric ID better reflect the diversity of those we serve. I have no doubt that we possess the resiliency to succeed.