AWIS 40th Anniversary Meeting, Session Summary

UPDATE: TO BE PUBLISHED

The Frontiers in Sustainability Panel at the AWIS 40^th anniversary conference consisted of three speakers, all from different areas of environmental science.

The first speaker, Ms. Kristen Graf, is the Executive Director of the Women of Wind Energy organization (WoWE). Ms. Graf started out as an engineering major intent on developing wind technology, but realized the technology itself is already developed. However, fossil fuels and nuclear energy still dominate the generation of electricity over renewable energy sources. The relative proportions of nonrenewables and renewables have actually remained fairly stagnant even with all of the media buzz and politicking surrounding renewables. This has happened despite wind power growing in popularity worldwide. Puzzlingly, this stagnation has occurred despite the increase in wind turbine production in the U.S. So why is this?

AWIS meeting report

Here is a report I did on the AWIS Philadelphia meeting. The topic was ethical considerations when pharmaceuticals and academic medicine mix. I am posting the full text here, or you can go to the AWIS-PHL website for a pdf version.

UPDATE: PUBLISHED IN AWIS MAGAZINE

October 2010 Meeting Report by Kerstin Nordstrom

Kathryn Ross (MBE, DMH (c)), the Research Coordinator for Quality Research at the American Board of Internal Medicine, gave a presentation entitled “Pharma’s Ties with Academic Medicine:“Ethical Concerns?” on October 19th at The College of New Jersey. This was a joint meeting between the Central New Jersey and Philadelphia AWIS chapters. She opened by formally defining a conflict of interest, a key issue for any ethical concern. A conflict of interest is a set of circumstances that create a risk that actions regarding a primary influence (e.g. patient health, research validity) will be unduly influenced by a secondary influence (e.g. financial gain) [1].