Welcome to the Texas ACSM website!
Greetings TACSM student and professional members. I hope that everybody managed to make it through this unique and challenging year and that you and your loved ones remained safe and healthy. Unfortunately, due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic we will not be hosting our annual TACSM meeting in 2021 in person; we will hold this meeting in a virtual format on Thursday and Friday February 25th and 26th. Our Executive Director, Lem Taylor, and the remainder of the executive leadership team has been working closely with National ACSM and the leadership from other regional chapters and have come up with a solution that will enable us to deliver state of the art research and clinical content to our membership while also providing an enriching and inspirational experience for our students to remain, or become, engaged and passionate about the overarching field of Kinesiology and exercise-science.
For the meeting this year we will be using a virtual platform called Forager One which will allow us to provide all of our synchronous and asynchronous meeting content available online both prior to (asynchronous content) and following (synchronous and asynchronous content) the meeting. Please pay special notice to email announcements and the TACSM website (www.tacsm.org) which will provide more detailed information regarding how to optimally navigate this platform for all of your meeting needs.
Please refer to the website (www.tacsm.org) for more detail on the full meeting agenda. That being said, we are proud to announce that we have assembled an exciting group of speakers who cover a wide range of research and clinical topics. Briefly, we are pleased to announce our Major Awards / Keynote Speakers: The TACSM Honor Award recipient is Blake Rasmussen, Professor & Chair of the Department of Nutrition & Metabolism at the University of Texas Medical Branch. The TACSM Service Award recipient this year is Dr. Susan Bloomfield; Research Professor, Texas A&M University. The Raven Lecture will be delivered by Dr. Nisha Charkoudian, Research Physiologist, Thermal and Mountain Division, United States Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine, Natick, MA. And as has been a primary focus of TACSM since its inception, we will continue to offer student speaking opportunities and awards for various content including; the Student Research Development Awards, Manuscript Awards, and the President’s Cup.
We are proud to announce two new positions that have been added to the TACSM Executive Board. The first is an Associate Executive Director Role which was filled by Dr. Ariane Hollub Secrect, Assistant Professor, University of Mary Harden-Baylor. She will play a pivotal role in assisting the Executive Director in the ever-growing list of responsibilities that fall under this role. The second position is a Director of Social Media which was filled by Drew Gonzalez, PhD Student at Texas A&M University. The primary responsibility of this role is to promote the different activities and accomplishments of TACSM throughout the course of the year using various Social Media platforms.
Last but certainly not least, we are fortunate to have obtained many different University and Industry sponsors for this upcoming meeting. While the format will not provide face to face contact with these sponsors, they will still have a virtual presence. We encourage all membership to take advantage of these opportunities to reach out to these sponsors as much as possible.
Please check the both the TACSM website (www.tacsm.org) for chapter updates and the national ACSM website (www.acsm.org) for important developments and information regarding research during the COVID-19 crisis.
I look forward to “seeing” all of you for our Annual Meeting on Feb 25th and 26th, 2020.
R. Matthew Brothers, PhD
TACSM Past-President
University of Texas at Arlington
Texas ACSM President 2020-Present