President's Message | December 2023

Francisco Laurindo, MD, University of São Paulo

Still under the spell of our fantastic meeting in Punta del Este, it is time for some reflection and looking ahead!

The SfRBM-SFRRI 2023 meeting was remarkable for top science discussions, friendly atmosphere, contagious enthusiasm and for new colleagues joining our discussions. And also, of course, for the very nice location; as you know, the first time our meeting was held outside of the US. We had a total of 439 registrants from 27 countries and one of the lowest attrition rates of any other SfRBM conference! There were 367 poster/oral presentations and, together with SFRRI and SFRRE, a total of 70 awards which helped support the participation of young students. Together, with my co-chair, Rafael Radi (to whom I am extremely grateful), we thank all the participants for making this venue so special and so inspiring. We only catalyzed this process but the ones who really made the job were each of you!

But as much as we are inspired by this meeting, we move on with our lives as usual and need to start planning the next one.

Before that, a first reminder important to everyone: please take your time to renew your dues for 2024!

Second, we have already started the call for symposium proposals regarding the SfRBM Meeting in Savannah, November 20-23, 2024. The deadline is March 1st, 2024. We encourage everyone to submit proposals that highlight the diversity and excellence of our science, particularly mechanistic studies, clinical applications, chemical biology, methods, omics, metabolism, cell biology and so many other topics. We also encourage symposium proposals by colleagues who submitted excellent proposals for our 2023 Meeting but could not be accepted because of space limitations. We plan to keep the same structure of our 2023 Meeting, though slightly condensed.

We count on you all to keep our society meeting as the nice inspiring venue to discuss top science, to network, and particularly to be the fertile field in which many young careers will develop and flourish!!