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The inaugural collaborative meeting between SRAI and the Australasian Research Management Society (ARMS) has been hailed as a great success! Held from March 25-27 at the Hilton Waikoloa Village on the Big Island of Hawaii this meeting attracted 117 delegates principally form the US and Australia but representing 9 countries in total. 

The theme of the meeting, Disruptive Trends in Research Management, was well addressed by two very different keynote speeches - the first from Dr David Sweeney, CEO of Research England who spoke of the need to better portray the relevance of research to an increasingly skeptical public, and the second from Catherine Wood of ARK Investments who outlined the five future disruptive technologies that her firm invests in as those that will shape the future.

These keynotes were ably supported by papers and workshops from research administrators from the US and Australia and included talks on the use of robotics and Artificial Intelligence in processing grants applications, use of detailed metrics to drive and evaluate research strategy and ways to capture and present the "real world" impact of research.

The conference venue was stunning, the weather perfect, and many new international friendships and networks resulted. As one of the conference co-chairs I felt privileged to be involved and need to give a big shout out to my co-chairs, Jennifer Freeman from SRAI and Sianna Panagiotopoulos from ARMS plus the administrative teams from ARMS and SRAI who enabled this to proceed so smoothly. I am confident that this is just the beginning of an ongoing very productive collaboration between our two research administration societies.