With your help we will have a productive 2024. This year we are incorporating our annual Gala into our Fall Fundraising Campaign. On Sunday, November 17, 2024 we will hold our Gala Dinner featuring Chordination A Cappella at the Croasdaile Country Club in Durham, NC and hope that all our supporters in North Carolina will attend this separate event as part of the full campaign.
In February we attended the annual meeting of the Triangle Consortium for Reproductive Biology where we gave two Campion Awards to outstanding junior investigators, who are visiting fellows at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, for their work in promoting a greater understanding of the role of calcium oscillations in the egg during the process of fertilization. Linka Radonova, PhD, won an award for “Mitochondria-endoplasmic reticulum domain of Ca 2++ signaling at fertilization” and Virginia Savy, PhD, was awarded a prize for best poster presentation entitled “Calcium oscillation: the egg’s pitch at fertilization”. We are confident, that these two individuals will be highly productive scientists in the future in keeping with the careers of past Campion Awardees. At this meeting the annual plenary lectureship was named the Phyllis Leppert Lectureship to honor our long- term commitment to supporting young investigators.
The Campion Fund continues to support the Mammalian Reproduction Gordon Conference. We are now pleased to expand our support for established and well-regarded scientific meetings by contributing to the Preterm Birth International Collaboration known as PREBIC’s North American Branch’s Annual Meeting for the next five years. At this meeting there will be sessions for new investigators to both present their work and sessions on how to succeed in their careers. After a presentation about the goals of the Campion Fund at their recent meeting, I had the privilege to meet Kristina Adams-Waldorf, a Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Washington, a NIH funded researcher in the field of immunity in pregnancy who is the Director of PREBIC, North America. We agree to interact with her laboratory for a series of seminars. I and other officers of the campion fund will attend the first seminar.
Our large up-coming national meeting this year is “Reducing Maternal Mortality: Strategies that Work” held jointly with Susan Stone, CNM, DNP of Frontier Nursing University, Versailles, Kentucky. This university pioneered the advanced education of nurses by beginning a school of nurse-midwives in 1939 and in 1970 established the first program for family nurse-practitioners in the United States. At this important meeting, internationally known leaders in the field of maternal health are presenting their work discussing research evidence of what is needed to reduce the tragically high rates of maternal mortality Iin our country. We are talking about solutions not just raising awareness of a serious public health problem. At this time, we have a total of 466 registrants for this virtual meeting.
Additionally, we have sent a monthly newsletter to scientists, physicians and nurses as well as member of the public and post educational material and blogs frequently on the Campion Fund website https//campionfund.org We maintain an active social media presence and are expanding to find ways to reach younger individuals by extending our social media presence to Instagram and Tic Toc. Opinions aside, these are the media that young people use regularly.
Despite all our positive activities we did struggle financially this past year. We have been told by advisors that donations for all non-profit organizations for 2023-2024 are down by ten percent and some organizations have even ceased to exist. We are aware that the election is demanding a great deal of our attention as well it should and that this makes our fall fundraising campaign difficult. We hope that you will not ignore out solicitation however and ask you to be generous.
Reproduction is the most important fact of life and without healthy reproduction life on earth will not exist. The Campion Fund continues to boost the fundamental sciences of reproduction by supporting and encouraging young investigators, conducting meetings for scientists on topics of international import to stimulate new avenues for research collaborations and to educate the public of the importance of reproductive science.
To make a donation please go to https://campionfund.org/donate-online
Please sign up for the Gala at https://campionfund.org/events
We are excited for our future programs and hope that you again contribute to making them a reality.
Won’t you consider a donation to help us in supporting fundamental reproductive science?
Sincerely yours,
Phyllis C. Leppert
Phyllis C. Leppert, MD, PhD
President, The Campion Fund