Dear Colleagues and Friends,
I sincerely trust you and all your loved ones have remained well during these tumultuous times.
You will recall that in March 2020 we took the decision to postpone the EAONO meeting in September 2020 to September 2021. Much has happened across the globe since then and like all of you, I too hope we are now at the ‘beginning of the end’ of this devastating pandemic.
After much discussion with my Local Organising Committee and the EAONO Executive, I am delighted to announce that the meeting will indeed take place in September this year – however we are planning to embrace the new world and convene a virtual meeting. In addition, we will now have an ‘EAONO week’, with the virtual conference running from Monday 6 to Friday 10 September 2021. Our plan is to harness the power and learning from the last 12 months that has impacted all our professional lives and convene an innovative conference.
Whilst we finalise the programme structure I can advise that broadly speaking, there will be two parallel virtual streams so we can still maintain a good number of sessions, we will have a daily plenary keynote lecture, live panels and clinical and discovery science short papers sessions and posters.
The instructional sessions, which are the bedrock of EAONO meetings, will be pre-recorded and selected by call for submissions and peer-review. These sessions will be either programme allocated or available on demand depending on the peer-review process. There will be a live question-and-answer session for the instructional sessions at the end of each afternoon. We will still encourage these instructional sessions to be delivered by a senior and junior colleague and could even be a presentation from the senior person and questions from the junior person! This way we still showcase our young up-and-coming otologists.
In additional we will invite the sponsors to deliver plenary sessions.
Finally, all material from the conference will be available to registrants for three months after the meeting.
The call for submissions for both the instructional sessions and papers/posters will be in April.
So, we are going to embrace the change rather than apologise for it and look forward to a successful meeting.
Wishing you the very best and looking forwards to ‘seeing’ you all soon.
Professor Shakeel R. Saeed
President of the European Academy of Otology and Neuro-Otology
