Welcome to your November newsletter from the World Muscle Society

It is a very great honour to be writing to you for the first time as the WMS President. As you will have seen in our General Assembly update last month, the new Executive Board of the World Muscle Society met for the first time at WMS 2025 in Vienna. We welcomed eight (50%) new members, thanked seven departing members, and selected the Executive Officers and Programme Committee Chair for the next three years.

With all these new faces there are plenty of ideas and projects that we look forward to bringing to reality in the coming months. I want to emphasise the strong democratic process at every single step. The number of candidates for every position underlines the huge interest of members to serve the WMS and the understanding of everyone that the election process is open and fair. You can read more about the makeup of the new WMS Executive Board in the news article linked below.

For those of you who didn't join us in Vienna, or who had to leave before our Saturday morning sessions, I wanted to bring you details of our 2025 prizewinners. Our Prize Committee, chaired by Marco Savarese, had a hard time deciding on who our winners should be, given the high standard of the science presented at WMS 2025. You can find out more about who the winners were using the link below. 

And in our final section on Congress news, Congress delegates participated in our legacy tokens initiative once again. We are donating £10,000 to local good causes in Vienna. You can find out more about the charities we're supporting and how the votes turned into cash using the link to the story below. 

Look out for the link to the WMS 2025 photo library on your WMS membership page. Our photographer captured all our Congress events, and members have exclusive access to the photo libraries from all previous Congresses. 

Away from Congress news, the previous WMS Executive Board had a series of discussions about making it easier to find and get in touch with other members. We know some other societies have directories of their members and have been looking into doing something similar at the WMS. We felt it would be a good way of breaking down barriers and supporting collaboration.

In order for your details to appear in the directory, you need to "opt-in" through your member account. On your membership page, select the "Members list" link and at the top of the page that opens, click the button that says "I want to be displayed on the Membership Directory". Your name will then appear in the WMS Membership Directory. We hope many of our members will opt in. 

I look forward to serving as your President and to hearing from you about our various WMS initiatives. 

With best wishes,