From the moment one begins immersing oneself in the full education, networking, and workforce development advocacy experience that an Association of Clinical Research Professionals (ACRP) conference encompasses, there’s almost limitless possibilities for meeting and learning from the new and exciting personalities one may encounter.
Did you know that at ACRP 2025 (which concluded on April 27 in New Orleans), you could have met such attendees—ACRP members, certificants, presenters, leaders, exhibitors, volunteers, or some combination thereof—as:
- A soon-to-be retiree who in her formative days was on the path toward a more traditional medical career before she “fell into” clinical research, attended her first ACRP conference mere months later, and spent 32 years directing clinical trial projects for an internationally active sponsor.
- A member who remembers seeing Colin Powell speak at the third of ACRP’s three previous conferences in New Orleans in 2000, when the theme was “Challenges of a Changing World.” (Sound familiar?) By the way, the other ACRP conferences held in the Big Easy were in 1981 and 1989.
- The first-time attendee from a major academic institution who’s conducting focus groups on, and designing a survey to gather solid data about, the clinical research workforce in league with the ACRP-led Partners Advancing the Clinical Research Workforce consortium.
- The attendee who advocates for more physicians to become principal investigators as part of furthering the drug discovery and development mission at a global life sciences firm.
- The speaker who’s a clinical trials educator originally from Zimbabwe but now based in Australia, and who is a champion for the establishment of standards and competencies for the upskilling of the clinical research workforce.
You are invited to visit our page of highlights from ACRP 2025 to see more of the moments and people you may have missed even if you were there. If you couldn’t make it to New Orleans for interactions through the weekend with the ACRP community—now boasting more than 20,000 members of the Association plus connections with many thousands more stakeholders in drug and device research—can you imagine yourself joining us for ACRP 2026 in Orlando? Or in San Diego for ACRP 2027? Or how about joining in on the celebrations for Clinical Trials Day on May 20?
In the meantime, keep a watch out on www.acrpnet.org for the Call for Proposals for ACRP 2026, coming any day now, if you are thinking about presenting on your favorite topic and meeting, sharing perspectives with, and learning about facets of the wide-ranging world of clinical research you may have never before examined from the kinds of intriguing personalities who make every ACRP conference, ACRP Chapter meeting, and other events so memorable.
Reported by Gary Cramer
