2020 SPPAC CONFERENCE HIGHLIGHTS

By Jessica Fales, Ph.D.

The SPPAC virtual conference was a huge success!

Huge kudos to Jennifer Pendley for making the difficult decision to move virtual and pulling Wendy Ward in to guide the way. Wendy was our task master and cheerleader! She showed tremendous leadership under extraordinary pressure. Christopher Cushing put in near Herculean effort to manage the logistics of the speakers and scheduling.

All of our speakers were incredible—responsive, flexible, and so patient with us. Chad Jensen worked tirelessly to ensure that our members could earn CE credits (and came up with contingency plans for anticipated technological difficulties). Melissa Santos was another MVP for the conference overall and with regard to the virtual switch—in her role as MAL for Diversity. Idia Thurston, Carolina Bejarano, and Katie Devine were also instrumental in helping keep conference programming intact and coordinating with students and SIGs. Dustin Wallace was so important in his role as webmaster, helping us quickly communicate updates to the membership and registrants. A world of thanks to KU and especially to Stacy Cordell, Amanda Morgan, Pam Hicks, and Karen Roberts who were doing a lot of heavy lifting behind the scenes.

Also, thank you to the Diversity SIG for highlighting diversity, equity, inclusion content in keeping with the conference them, the Obesity SIG for providing #stretchbreaks, the brand new Professional Wellness team for providing wellness suggestions via Twitter throughout the conference, and the Digital Health SIG who served as room hosts/moderators along with many other Twitter engagement volunteers. There were many volunteers behind the scene, enhancing engagement on Twitter. And of course—overwhelming response from the conference attendees. A huge thank you to all of you for sticking with us!

A huge thank you to Jessica for all of her unending hardwork as SPPAC chair!