Letter from the President

The coronavirus pandemic has dramatically influenced our day to day lives. Apart from a big negative impact on health, socializing, working, and spending our free time, it has also brought a renewed interest in old and new hobbies, more time with family and general time for reflection and altruism. I am curious whether or not the coronavirus has affected the type of research conducted by RC33 members. Unfortunately, we cannot tell until next year, since all conferences in 2020 have been postponed. We expect to organize three conferences next year: Botswana (1st Regional African Conference in March), the Forum in Brazil (July) and our very own RC33 conference in September in Cyprus. We hope the postponement of conferences does not affect your research work, and we hope to see you all next year. I am happy to mention that our non-conference related activities are all doing great. We have developed an ongoing blog on our website (www.rc33.org), we have reduced membership fees for Cat. B and C countries, and we have renewed our relationship with the BMS journal. In addition, we have created two RC33 awards (best young scholar and best paper), to be awarded at our RC33 conference in Cyprus in September 2021. Since the award has also been postponed, there will be a new call for nominations next year. So if you think you are working on a great paper now, please keep your eye on the submission deadline for the awards. Of course, current submissions will be included as well, and current nominees are still able to submit another (better) paper if they want to. I regret not seeing you in person this year. This feels very odd. However, I hope to see you next year at one of RC33’s conferences to support RC33. Until then, I hope you stay in good health, and are inspired by the coronacrisis to do new exciting research.

Vera Toepoel