Blog Spot

More than ever, the importance of community is central in everyone’s minds and this is increasingly true for the measurement sector globally. In recent weeks we have heard senior government officials comment on how testing is going to be important for a long time ahead and how the testing/measurement sector are increasingly recognised as an 'important industry'. As measurement scientists, this is of course music to our ears…it’s just a shame it took something like this to hear these comments.

So – what has CAMS been doing on the COVID-19 front? In the first few lockdown days, CAMS Executive and Industry Board members convened to discuss how we might support testing efforts – and importantly find innovations to help with future (next generation) diagnostics and understanding through measurement of COVID-19. Our discussions focused on the emerging proposals in the Mass Spectrometry community arena and we re happy to announce our interest in developments proposed by the COVID-19 Mass Spectometry coalition. We would urge any MS experts not already supporting this to look at the link to find out more. I would also encourgae you to look at the BIA's COVID-19 taskforce page. On 7 May we streamed a webinar where a number of CAMS members explained what measurement innovations are going on around our community. You can watch a recording here. A second webinar will take place on 15 June, so please get in touch with the CAMS Secretariat if you would like to take part in that event.

Elsewhere, our Industry Board met at the end of April to discuss new industry proposals which are now ready for the Academic Board to review and put forward project ideas, questions and challenges. We hope this process will be as open and interactive as possible with our academic members so we can start some truly innovative PhD and postdoctoral projects from September onwards (we hope), thereby supporting the skills and development of the next generation of measurement scientists. Also looking ahead to September – if you haven’t already seen the announcement – we are continuing to plan our first CAMS annual conference. We hope it will be face-to-face in London (with appropriate social distancing) but we are also planning for a virtual event, so look out for more information soon.

Finally, I’m pleased to say that the CAMS legal entity and bank accounts were finalised in recent weeks and members have been ‘formalising’ their membership by paying in! It’s great to have passed this milestone and we look forward to continuing to welcome new members in. If you have any ideas for how we could expand and improve our offerings, we look forward to hearing from you.