Right now, most of our staff is attending the American Geriatrics Society meeting in Maryland just outside Washington, DC. We are looking forward to four days jam-packed with information about nearly everything related to geriatrics. We are also looking forward to many of our friends and grantees gaining the recognition they deserve. For example, Sharon Levine, MD, AGSF, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Boston University School of Medicine, will receive the 2011 Dennis W. Jahnigen Memorial Award. The annual award recognizes an AGS member who has made great contributions to geriatrics education. Dr. Levine is a longtime partner in Foundation projects, such as the Practicing Physician Education project and our Chief Resident Immersion Training in the Care of Older Adults (CRIT) program.

A pair of longtime foundation friends and grantees will be delivering key lectures. As the winner of AGS’s Outstanding Scientific Achievement for Clinical Investigation Award, Catherine Sarkasian, MD, MSPH, Associate Professor in the Division of Geriatrics at the UCLA School of Medicine, will be discussing ways to increase walking among older adults by changing age expectations within communities. In addition to her membership in the UCLA Center of Excellence, Dr. Sarkasian is also a Beeson Scholar and head of L.A. CAPRA , the Los Angeles Community Academic Partnership for Research in Aging.

Mary Tinetti, MD, will be giving the Henderson State of the Art Lecture, in which she will summarize her and her colleagues’ research on fall prevention and put it into the broader context of existing knowledge on falls. She will also discuss efforts to translate this evidence into clinical practice and describe how falls research has influenced health policy issues in areas such as quality measurement, patient safety, and reimbursement. Mary is a longtime Center of Excellence director at Yale University, former chair of the Beeson Advisory Committee, and a current Health and Aging Fellow. In 2009, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for her leadership in the area of falls prevention and falls research.

We are extremely proud of these leading researchers, as well as the many others who will be receiving awards at the meeting. We also congratulate Jeffrey Silverstein, MD, who is receiving AGS’s acknowledgment of the 25th anniversary of the Foundation for Anesthesia Education and Research. He is the past chair of our project called “Section for Enhancing Geriatric Understanding and Expertise among Surgical and Medical Specialists,” or SEGUE. Finally, two Center of Excellence faculty members, Kellie Flood, MD, from the University of Alabama and Cynthia M. Carlsson, MD, from the University of Wisconsin (also a Beeson Scholar), have been honored with invitations to present plenary papers during the meeting. We look forward to watching these outstanding researchers, as well as many others, receive their awards and present their lectures during the meeting. We also look forward to sharing additional insights from the meeting, which always proves an inspiring time for those of us committed to improving health care for older adults in the United States.