President elect's-column

I hope that you can join us for the upcoming APA annual conference this summer, being held in Honolulu, Hawai'i from July 31st to Aug. 4th. The theme for Division 49 is Group Psychology and Group Psychotherapy Around the World: Research and Practice.

Honolulu is a diverse and international city and our programming will represent the multitude of different ways that groups are conducted, taught and researched within the United States and around the globe.

Of course, in addition to this theme, we welcome all group related submissions, including posters, symposia, workshops and continuing education sessions. We strongly encourage students to submit poster sessions to Division 49. For those students who are the first author on their poster session, we have a student poster competition with monetary awards.

Last year, several of our programs were approved for continuing education credits and they were hugely successful and well-attended. We know that we will have the same quality of sessions this year. If you are interested in volunteering for Division 49 at the conference or throughout the year, please contact me.

This year our program chairs are Cheri Marmarosh, PhD, and John Dagley, PhD. They will be putting together a program that concentrates on great learning opportunities for early professionals, seasoned professionals, researchers and those that provide training in group. The deadline for submissions is Nov. 16, 2012. We hope you will submit your work and look forward to seeing you in Hawai'i.