In around 2003, Joanne Kamens had a realization after attending a week of meetings at her pharmaceutical company and never sitting in a room with another woman (and being asked to take “minutes” more than once). This resulted in her doing what scientists do – research on what happened to all the women? She stumbled on the national AWIS website and was confused to find no Boston Chapter. Of all cities, how could Boston not have a chapter? It turned out that the Boston chapter had folded in the early 80’s leaving a void. Meanwhile, Kristin O’Brien was asking the same questions of the national AWIS office. Joanne and Kristin were introduced and they decided to see what they could do about re-founding a chapter in the Boston area. Joanne and Kristin struggled through figuring out how to start a chapter (a process now much improved with the help of the amazing Cindy Simpson in the AWIS national office). Now… how to get the word out? This was before the real advent of social media outlets so we had to go kind of old school. Back then email was just becoming an integral part of life and no one had a smart phone! The national office had a list of AWIS members who lived in Massachusetts. In October 2004, Joanne and Kristin finally sent a blast email to this list and announced an informal organizational meeting to take place in Joanne’s living room in Newton, MA. About 20 women showed up! They were all fired up and excited to be there. Some women there had been part of the original Boston Area AWIS chapter and were helpful in getting this started back up. By-laws were drafted. A bank account was opened. Joanne took the role of president and Kristin took the role of treasurer to get things started. With so much history and enthusiastic help, the chapter started off strong with a full slate of programs. The first year of MASS AWIS programming included networking events, program planning/recruiting, panel discussions, and sharing science talks. One of the attendees at that meeting was Rebecca Pitts who would later become our second chapter president in 2007. Penny Beuning, the president of the new Boston GWIS was also there as well as Karen Yee who had been active in the Seattle chapter of AWIS. Karen has been an integral part of MASS AWIS since then serving on the Chapter Board in many roles. We chose the name MASS AWIS because it had a nice ring and we wanted to include areas outside Boston when possible. In 2005, MASS AWIS started the Yahoo email list and this has steadily grown and grown over the years and we started using Acteva for event registration in 2006. Currently the chapter has over 200 members as we enter our 20th year.