John Morris, MD ATA Secretary/ Chief Operating Officer

Dear Colleagues,

The search for the Editor of VideoEndocrinology is underway . Tony Hollenberg, who serves as chair of our publications committee is chairing the search committee for this effort. This is obviously an exciting time for ATA with the launch of this new video journal, the first of its kind in our specialty. We anticipate that most of many of the video publications will be surgical in orientation and that the editor will likely have a surgical background, however we also anticipate a variety of non-procedural videos on surgical and non-surgical topics will be included and that the new editor and the editorial board will be pioneers in this novel platform of scientific communication.

The numbers of registrations, hotel rooms reserved, and abstracts received indicate that our annual meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico will be an outstanding one. The scientific program, which has been organized by Julie Ann Sosa, Ron Koenig, and members of their program committee will be stimulating, broad in scope, and include the best of basic, clinical, and translational thyroid science. The venue in San Juan promises to be beautiful and unique. We are looking forward to seeing you there—don't miss it!

The ATA election is underway and links to the electronic ballots sent to your inboxes very shortly. The slate of candidates recommended by the nominations committee for officers is a very strong one. PLEASE VOTE! Historically we have enjoyed only between 25% and 30% voter response in our elections and we should be able to do better. The process that has been implemented by our office, using SurveyMonkey.com, is efficient and easy. The ballot is open until Monday, October 7. If you do not have the email containing the link for voting, please call the ATA office and we will be glad to re-send it to you. Results will be announced at the annual business meeting in San Juan. PLEASE VOTE.

If you haven't visited the ATA website recently, please do so now. You will see that it has been recently extensively update and renovated to make it more attractive and user-friendly for our membership, patients, and visiting web-browsers. Links to the members-only section are clearly marked and you will be able to find all of our important documents, publications, lists, and links with only a click or two. All back issues of Signal, and Clinical Thyroidology as well as easy access to Mary Ann Liebert and Thyroid are prominently displayed as are all of our governance documents, committee memberships, and the all-important member directory and list of new members. While you are there you can update your biographical information in the directory if you haven't already.

Finally, a heads-up about upcoming guidelines. We anticipate completion of the work of several hard-working guidelines groups within the next few weeks. The Pediatric Thyroid Cancer Guidelines task force, which is chaired by Gary Francis, expects to have a final draft of their document by the time of the annual meeting and to submit it for publication shortly thereafter. The most visible of our guidelines, the Thyroid Nodule and Thyroid Cancer Guidelines, which is chaired by Bryan Haugen, will also be completing their update of this document by the end of the year and we anticipate publication of that document in early 2014. Already in review is the newest and perhaps most unique of our guideline efforts, ATA Guide to Investigating Thyroid Hormone Economy and Action in Rodent and Cell Models.

This is an extensive description of methods and techniques for thyroid basic research and has been chaired by Tony Bianco. It promises to assist countless investigators, young and not-so-young in answering questions about thyroid biology and pathology and support the basic science activities of our organization.

John Morris, MD
Secretary/Chief Operating Officer