The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all of us over the past few weeks and has forced us to change the way we live and work. But in adversity lies opportunity. Many measurement scientists will have been directly applying their skills as part of the efforts to defeat the disease and CAMS provides an excellent forum for us to share our expertise and form new collaborative alliances. Most of us have also found ourselves spending a lot more time working from home and this seems to have generated a huge increase in demand for online learning resources such as webinars, training videos and interactive educational resources. Again, CAMS has been able to play its part by offering online materials through BEAM. That said, BEAM is still at an early stage of development and further contributions of high-quality training materials would be very welcome, please don’t hesitate to contact the CAMS Secretariat if you have something in mind.
Of course, the pandemic will not last forever and normality will return at some point. We will be staging our first CAMS conference in September and we are still hopeful that it will be a face-to-face event rather than virtual. CAMS members are involved in world-class research both in academia and in industry and I would urge all member organizations to consider presenting some of their work at the event.
Talking of research, now that CAMS exists as a legal entity (CAMS Ltd.) and we have someone to pay our subs to, there should be no obstacle to initiating collaborative research projects between industrial and academic partners. Several ideas have already been mooted and now is the time to dust them off and make at least some of them happen!
Lastly, I will be retiring in September and so will stand down from the Industry Advisory Board at that time. I have enjoyed my brief spell in the chair and I am pleased (as well as relieved) that we finally managed to get the CAMS membership agreement over the finishing line. I wish CAMS and its members every success in the future. I chose analytical science as my own career and found it immensely rewarding. I’d like to think that CAMS will play a prominent part in fostering many more analytical science careers in the future.
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