Today marks the beginning of the next year in MND research around the world, or at least it certainly feels like that! It is the first day of the three day, international MND research conference that the MND Association of England, Wales and Northern Ireland is immensely proud to organise.
For colleagues and many volunteers around the world who work together to make the conference happen it begins a New Year, as the day has finally arrived when our year-long planning falls into place. Like the MND Association can’t run without its volunteers, the same is true for the conference. Eminent MND researchers and doctors give up their time to serve on our Programme Committee, chaired by Professor Kevin Talbot in Oxford, and involving many others from Ireland to the USA. At the conference itself we’ve been supported by volunteers from the Irish MND Association, travelling from around the country to come and help out. A big thank you to them all.
Of course the most important reason why it feels like the beginning of a New Year is the sheer potential of new knowledge gained, new connections made, new ideas sparked by having over 1,100 MND clinicians and researchers together in one place. Who knows what the impact of those chance conversations will be in years to come! We hope that they’ll make a big difference to understanding MND and to developing treatments for people with MND. We also hope that the discussions started now will improve the way that symptoms of MND are managed and improve the quality of life for people with MND, their carers and their wider families.
We’ve picked out ten themes that will be presented at the Symposium on our ‘Symposium Live’ page on our website – there is a live link to twitter there aswell. Over the next few days we’ll be posting blogs from the conference too.
Happy New MND Year!
