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The 12th ISNI Congress: beyond expectations!

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The 2014 edition of our congress was held in Mainz, Germany, from November 9 - 13 and was a great success: more than 1000 people attended, coming from 45 different countries and from all 5 continents of the world.
The true measure of success was the number of posters accepted by the scientific committee to take part in the 3 days’ poster sessions: 587. That is a real indicator of how the congress is perceived as the ultimate meeting in Neuroimmunology. All the posters have been published in a special issue of the Journal of Neuroimmunology.

The local hosts and scientific organizers, Prof. Frauke Zipp (Director of the Department of Neurology) and Prof. Ari Waisman (Director of the Institute for Molecular Medicine), both from the University Medical Center of the Johannes Gutenberg University, developed an interesting scientific programme that has drawn the interest of the scientific community.

The ISNI’s General Assembly

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During the General Assembly, the Secretary-Treasurer Roberto Furlan thanked the ten members leaving their post within the IAB (B. Becher, A. Coles, R. Gold, R. Hintzen, L. Probert, M. Schwartz, L. Steinman, P. Villoslada, T. Yamamura) and welcomed the newly elected board members:

  • Alexandre Prat, CANADA
  • Samia Khoury, USA/LEBANON
  • Cinthia Farina, ITALY
  • Sergio Baranzini, USA
  • Jonathan Kipnis, USA
  • Zsolt Illés, DENMARK
  • Jorge Correale, ARGENTINA
  • David Brown, AUSTRALIA
  • Akio Suzumura, JAPAN
  • Phillip Popovich, USA

V. Wee Yong

 

Likewise, Roberto Furlan also announced that Prof. Michal Schwartz (The Maurice and Ilse Katz - Professorial Chair in Neuroimmunology - Weizmann Institute of Science) was elected as ISNI's new Vice-President.

Furthermore, Gianvito Martino, the outgoing President, described ISNI's improvements and results achieved over the last two years: a totally new website (www.isniweb.org) is online, with updated web content and a more efficient and member-friendly interface; the number of active members increased by 51% since November 2012.

 

Michal Schwartz

At the end of his talk, Gianvito Martino welcomed ISNI’s new President Dr. V. Wee Yong, Professor at the Hotchkiss Brain Institute and the Departments of Clinical Neurosciences and Oncology at The University of Calgary, and co-director of the Multiple Sclerosis (MS) Program there. Dr. Yong, the holder of the Canada Research Chair in Neuroimmunology, expressed confidence that the field of neuroimmunology will continue to escalate and provide impactful insights to the understanding and treatment of neurological disorders.

What's next?

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Judith Greer and David Brown

During the General Assembly it was announced that the IAB voted for the 14th ISNI Congress to be held in Brisbane, Australia in 2018. Congratulations to David Brown and Judith Greer who presented the winning bid and will be the co-chairs of that event.
The other bidders were Paris (France), Basel (Switzerland) and Bergen (Norway): they lost by one count!

 

Last but not least, Dimitrios Karussis (co-chair, alongside Michal Schwartz, of the forthcoming ISNI in Jerusalem, 2016) briefly described the next steps related to the 2016 ISNI congress, which promises to be another outstanding scientific event.

 

 

 

 

 Dimitrios Karussis

The 14th ESNI Course

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The 14th European School of Neuroimmunology (ESNI) course, chaired by the one of the school’s coordinators, Prof. Gianvito Martino (Head of the INSPE Unit – San Raffaele Hospital, Milan), preceded the four days of our biennial congress and reached a record of 584 attendees. Additional good news is that the ISNI’s official school, ESNI, will be strengthened by two new schools of Neuroimmunology: one for the Americas and one for the Asia-Pacific area.

This decision stems from the excellent record of ESNI since its inception in 1999, training thousands of young researchers. ESNI is recognized as an organizational model that will now be created in two areas of the world in order to escalate the teaching and impact of neuroimmunology.