A Message from President Amy Sullivan

Dear Colleagues,

Happy Spring! The start to 2025 has definitely presented many unique and unexpected challenges to the scientific community. It is never easy when so many things feel like they are not in our control. But I, the Executive Committee, and Board of Directors all truly hope that you know that AAAR is here and will continue to be here for you. I think we can all agree that AAAR is a well-regarded professional society for aerosol science and technology. Our conference provides an amazing forum to showcase advances and highlight the cutting-edge research going on in our field. But I think it is also those chance meetings in the hallway outside of a Technical Session or an informal chat with a fellow aerosol enthusiast sitting next to you that have had an immeasurable impact on our members and help contribute to AAAR’s success. It is really that sense of an open and welcoming scientific community that is the center of what makes AAAR so remarkable. When I attended my first AAAR conference in 2003, I don’t think I could have ever imagined the opportunities it and this amazing community would present to me beyond sharing my research.

To that end, when the Board met in person on March 1st for our jam-packed, but very productive Winter Board Meeting, we all agreed that we wanted to make sure everyone would continue to have these opportunities. The Board voted not to increase the Annual Conference registration fees. Following the recommendation from the Education Committee, we also voted to increase the amount of all Travel Grants by 20%. We are working on securing sponsorship to increase the number of Travel Grants offered this year compared to years past. In addition, our Vice President, Suresh Dhaniyala, plans to use his President’s Fund this year to provide travel support to ensure that our colleagues impacted by the recent reduction-in-force federal directive can join us in October in Buffalo.

Speaking of Buffalo, taking to heart the feedback that we received following last year’s conference, Jason Surratt (our 2025 Conference Chair) and I had a chance to visit Buffalo with Emily Charles and Taylor Brown from AAAR’s Events Team at Virtual. We can’t tell you enough how impressed we were with everything we saw and how much Buffalo is looking forward to welcoming AAAR in October! We all stayed in the conference hotel, the Hyatt Regency Buffalo Hotel. It has very recently been renovated and is connected to the Buffalo Convention Center. This convention center seems to be a bit of a hidden gem. They will be providing the entire space to AAAR for free for the entire week, as well as letting us use anything in their inventory for free. The meeting space will work well for our conference. The Exhibit Hall is particularly impressive, it is so big that we will be able to cut it in half! The location of the convention center is wonderful, only 15 minutes from the Buffalo Niagara International Airport, and right in downtown. There are a number of amazing restaurants in any direction and surrounding the convention center, very similar to our experiences at the Raleigh Convention Center. (You will need to ask Jason and I about the Italian food we had the first night we were there!) The area is very safe and walkable at any time of day. There is also a light rail, which is completely free to ride, that runs through downtown and passes right in front of the convention center and the hotel. While we were there, we also met with Visit Buffalo. They provided a lot of wonderful local information that we plan to share with you and add to the conference website. Visit Buffalo will also continue to work with us, leading up to and during the conference, including setting up a table in the convention center for us during the conference to provide helpful resources. As part of a driving tour, they even showed us a great route from the convention center to Canalside along Buffalo’s waterfront that could be used for our annual Wednesday morning Fun Run. We hope you all are looking forward to coming to Buffalo in October as we are!

As always, if you have any questions or if there is anything I can do to help, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me at amy.sullivan@colostate.edu.

Sincerely,

Amy P. Sullivan

2025 AAAR President

Aerosol Magee Scientific