CHAIRMAN’S MESSAGE

HAPPY BIRTHDAY ITEA!

We are 45 years old in 2025 and kicked off a year-long celebration at the Directed Energy Test & Evaluation Joint Conference in Albuquerque, NM in February. We have special events and recognition planned, not least of which is our first workshop hosted outside the U.S., with the theme of Delivering T&E to Support the Pace of Technology Change, May 20 – 21, in Portsmouth, United Kingdom. I hope to see several of you there. We also have special features planned for The ITEA Journal and our website, so visit early and visit often.

Many of us started this year with a big change, return to onsite work full time. It’s bracing to recall that we’ve been in COVID-19 mode for nearly five years, working remotely with little in-person contact with our colleagues. I have gone in one day per week for at least two years and my office in the 1944 vintage Army Research Laboratory building was dark, quiet, cold, and less clean than in previous years. The week of 10 February it was bright (all the lights were on), bustling, still cold, and still less clean than one would like, BUT it is the beginning of our new normal. The building will be cleaned regularly, weekly trash pickup will resume, but most importantly, we will have in-person conversations and unplanned exchanges in the hall that simply cannot be replicated by TEAMS, no matter how valuable it is for collaboration. Alone is good and I work well that way, but I work best when I can interact with smart people, challenging them and being challenged by them, feeding off each other’s ideas and enthusiasm.

Another big change is the conference travel ban for federal government employees and contractors. We don’t know how long this will be in effect, but it is already having impact on the Test Instrumentation Workshop, originally scheduled for April. We are postponing it until later in the year. We could cancel and move on, but we have held this key Workshop for 30 years and want to find a way to bring this community of experts together in 2025. Stay tuned at itea.org for updates.

I mentioned the T&E Joint Conference in Albuquerque, which ITEA co-hosted with the Directed Energy Professional Society. Great Conference and my first time attending. The presentations and discussions were very technical, perfect for this nerd. We organized a STEAM competition for 2 middle school and 4 high school teams. It was fun watching the students take it seriously, struggle with planning and working together, then grasp that they MUST work together, and finally see their progress. After demonstrations, judging, and award presentations, one middle school boy had a most serious expression as he walked among his teammates, looked directly at one of them, and exclaimed “I could never have gotten through this without coffee.” He was at most 13 years old.

A change coming to ITEA reflects our maturity as an organization. A small group of us – Dr. Malcolm Tutty, Dr. David Brown, Dr. Laura Freeman, Dr. Eileen Bjorkman and I – put before the Board of Directors a proposal to implement membership grades – Student Member, Member, Senior Member, Associate Fellow, and Fellow. It will be voted on at the April Board meeting and, if approved, our goal is to have everything in place for the Annual Symposium in November in Destin, FL. I am communicating this to you so that you will hold us accountable as we implement in stages throughout the year; don’t let us slack. ITEA members will finally have a growth path analogous to what we have in our jobs.

The heart of any professional association is its members. When you join ITEA you are affiliated with a Chapter based on your geographical location. Each Chapter has an Executive Committee – President, Vice President, Secretary, and Treasurer. Their goal is to engage the community. Chapters accomplish this by hosting local events, such as a luncheon with a guest speaker, a workshop with a technical theme that resonates in the community, or even a STEAM competition with local Middle and High School Students. Each Chapter decides what’s best for its local community. The highlight of any Chapter is establishing a scholarship program to enable the future T&E workforce!

We are reinvigorating the Chapters in 2025. A big thank you to those Chapter Presidents who are making a difference already! The effort is being led by our Vice Chairman, Mr. Erwin Sabile, and his goal is to get members of the Board of Directors more actively engaged with local Chapters, a kind of Adopt-a-Chapter. You will read more about this throughout the year, but once again, we are asking you to hold us accountable. We are looking for additional leaders to work with the Board to continue to strengthen our heart.

Confession time. In the December 2024 issue I claimed for my Message that “… by the time you read it each quarter, it will fit on one page (starting next quarter).” So that must have been a hallucination. First, I like to talk and I like to write, so I will not keep it to one page. More importantly, now that more of my neurons are firing, I realized that with an online Journal there are no pages and no page count. That trivial realization was very freeing. End of confession.

When was the last time you contributed to The Journal? When have you presented at one of our events? Our 45-year-old Association is here for your professional growth and advancement. ITEA was established to become the premiere organization for the T&E community to learn, share, and advance. Today, we are the only professional society dedicated to T&E. We continue to provide platforms, digital and physical, for your ideas and experience: in The Journal, at a workshop or the annual Symposium, and through networking with leaders and peers. Get involved and contribute. Gain recognition through the Journal, events, and our T&E Awards program. Be part of advancing test and evaluation, documenting developments for its history, and educating the future workforce. Join us in a conversation on how together we can accomplish more.