Friends and colleagues!

Dear colleagues & friends,

This has been a year like no other so far!

As you may have already noticed through various information channels, the EANS Board has decided to organise our 2020 annual Congress electronically.

This decision was deemed necessary for various reasons, the most important one being the health of our delegates, while the other was the uncertainty around the ever changing travel restrictions.

Although we will miss the opportunity for direct interaction with colleagues from all over Europe and the world, the decision to go fully ‘virtual’ was the only viable option in order to assure a Congress that would still allow equal options for everybody to present and to participate.

And here, we are counting on you all – to link into our eEANS Congress website and to participate to a maximum. It is the first and possibly not the last occasion where we will be trying to build a fully virtual congress format. Hence, your participation and your feedback are essential to us. There shall be state-of-the-art lectures by international experts, and many classical lectures, selected from the submitted abstracts.

Here I should thank Francesco Sala, who had already done an enormous amount of work by composing the original Congress programme. Now, he has had to restructure and adapt it to the eEANS format – a tremendous task! The team around Lukas Rasulic has to be thanked as well, as they have been on standby with their Belgrade physical arrangements until the very last minute. And, they were generous to accept the need to postpone their physical congress to 2022.

As a scientific organisation we have obligations to fulfill in order to maintain our legal status. As such, we are obliged to hold an annual meeting of our Executive Board; and most importantly of our General Assemly (= our parliament), which counts app. 120 delegates from all our national membership societies and from our IM representatives. In order to stay within our legal framework, I am herewith requesting that all delegates to the General Assembly do link to our digital General Assembly meeting on October 18, 2020. We have several important decisions to make, and therefore we must reach the Quorum of votes.

So, let’s be positive about our fully virtual eEANS congress. Let’s learn from it for the future. And yet, let’s hope that we will be united again soon in the real world – no later than in Hamburg 2021, and ideally before, on the occasion of our various courses and educational activities.

I wish you an excellent eEANS!

Yours truly,
For and on behalf of the EANS Board

 

Karl Schaller

EANS President

More information at https://eans2020.com/

 

 

More information at https://eans2020.com/