The AUA Speaker Exchange is Now Live

Matching Talented Junior Faculty Speakers with Dynamic Venues

The COVID-19 pandemic has severely disrupted scientific conferences, travel, and exchange. Opportunities to present at other institutions, meet future collaborators and sponsors, and receive constructive feedback have been limited. This disruption hit junior faculty members, who are building their CVs and do not yet have established networks, particularly hard. The AUA Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) has launched a virtual speaker exchange platform to counteract this disruption. We aim to use new technologies to support continued sharing of academic work and engaging in cross-institutional communication and collaboration. The speaker exchange will facilitate virtual or remote presentations to enhance the flow of academic knowledge within our specialty and provide an ongoing opportunity for speaking engagements that do not require the time and material resources for travel. Even as lecture series are beginning to return to in-person presentations, these remote engagements will provide a widely accessible and lasting alternative to more traditional speaking engagements, which will be helpful as clinical pressures increase.

The goal of the AUA Remote Speaker Exchange Platform is to match highly accessible speaking engagements with qualified and interested speakers in order to promote interpersonal networking, scientific collaboration, and academic advancement in academic anesthesiology. While open to all members of the academic anesthesiology community, it is designed specifically to focus on junior faculty speakers. Small, intimate host venues such as divisional conferences and research seminars are anticipated to make up the majority of host venues, although any venue seeking speakers can be listed. All engagements will be performed remotely to limit barriers associated with travel. This program is designed to reflect the AUA principles of diversity and inclusion with respect to speakers and care will be taken to be inclusive of hosts and speakers from small and medium size academic programs. It is open to all individuals who are engaged in the pursuit of discovery in all fields related to anesthesiology, critical care, and pain medicine. While speakers are expected to pursue academic careers in anesthesiology, they need not yet have achieved AUA member status to participate in the speaker exchange. The AUA has assembled a board to provide oversight for both speakers and host venues to allow for helpful feedback between the parties involved and also to ensure a high-quality experience and to engage in process improvement over time.

Those who are interested in speaking or are able to host speaker venues are encouraged to apply via the AUA website Association of University Anesthesiologists AUA Speaker Exchange - Association of University Anesthesiologists (auahq.org). Individuals offering host venues will be asked to input information about the nature of their venue and about the topics of interest to their audience. Host venues will be asked to provide a minimum of two one-on-one meetings between the speaker and members of the audience, to facilitate networking and to offer constructive critique of the lecture. Speaker applicants will be asked to input information about themselves and their topics of interest, and will subsequently submit a brief written and video abstract for evaluation by the Remote Speaker Board. Applicants who are at the Instructor and Assistant Professor levels are further asked to identify a mentor who will help them in the preparation of their talk.

The AUA is proud to sponsor the Remote Speaker Platform and anticipates that it will be a lasting contribution to the scientific community, which reaches beyond the membership of the AUA to help promote academic anesthesia everywhere.