'Stop scaring the children': a call for resilient and tenacious optimism

Welcome everyone to the 2020 Business Meeting of the American Physician Scientists Association (APSA). My name is Abhik Banerjee, and I serve as the 2019–2020 President for the organization. As you are aware because of the COVID-19 pandemic, we had been forced to cancel our 2020 Association of American Physician (AAP)/American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI)/APSA Joint Meeting at the Fairmont Chicago, originally scheduled on April 3 to 5, 2020. The safety of our membership is our top priority, and our organization is currently navigating through the aftermath of the cancelled meeting. Despite not being able to facilitate an in-person meeting for trainees of all stages of their physician-scientist career development, we are committed to continue to be the student physician-scientist’s leading voice for improving educational opportunities, advancing patient-oriented research, and advocating for the future of translational medicine. In keeping with our organization’s mission and based on several trainee requests, APSA has elected to provide Annual Meeting–related content online via the GoToMeeting platform over the originally scheduled weekend. Despite the rapidly changing public health crisis our country faces, our organization remains steadfast in our commitment to advocate for trainees’ needs, and we hope you take advantage of the excellent programming our volunteers have coordinated over these next two days.