The Academic Year Class of 2006-2007 was made up of twelve students. Nine of the twelve were still in the United States at the time of the BMEP FORUM II, held on the weekend of 23-25 March 2007, in Farmington, Connecticut at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine. One student was excused from attending the FORUM by Dr. Stolte, so that he could accept an invitation to attend an HIV conference in Canada.
We had five U.S.-based alumni who spoke at the FORUM, and one other who attended the afternoon meetings and the Saturday evening dinner. There are a number of other BMEP alumni who are living in the United States who would have liked to attend the meeting, but were committed to attend other professional or family gatherings at the time of the FORUM. Perhaps they will be able to join us in another year. Their experiences are of great interest to the students who are now or soon will be following in their footsteps.
We were fortunate to have chosen the weekend of 23-25 March for the FORUM, since the U.S. has experienced much extreme weather during the months of February, March and April, and our time in Farmington was blessed with fair skies and (relatively) warm weather. We are also fortunate to again have the assistance of Dr. Peter Deckers, Dean of the School of Medicine, and Dr. Ralph Arcari, who is now a semi-retired professor of the School of Medicine. Dr. Arcari not only arranged for the use of a large comfortable room at the School of Medicine for our morning session, but he also came to our rescue by arranging for us to borrow an LCD projector from the School’s library, so that our afternoon speakers could make their presentations in a meeting room of the Farmington Inn. In addition, he was once again a featured speaker at the FORUM, delivering a very informative and interesting lecture on the history of medicine.
This year, for the first time in many years, we had a student from the U.S. go to Germany as an exchange student. Merry Marwig is not a medical student, but instead is interested in corporate identity and corporate responsibility. Her area of interest lies within the varied fields of interest to the International Academy of Life Sciences (IALS), of which BMEP is now a part. Her home institution is the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which is the university where Robert F. Rich, Ph.D., Chairman of the Board of IALS, chairs the Institute of Government and Public Affairs, and where he is also a Professor of Law and Political Science.
The group of students in the Academic Year 2006-2007 have been a pleasure to work with, and easily fit the profile of most BMEP students, who are always very intelligent, very nice, very good looking, and this year especially, very tall. You will see what I mean when you look at the photo of me standing next to four of them at the Mark Twain Museum.
My thanks go to those who have made my seventh year with BMEP U.S. such a pleasure.

Sincerely,

Laurie B. Williams
U.S. Program Coordinator