Dear Colleagues,
it is a pleasure to invite you to the 30th Annual Meeting of the Society of Virology from March 24th-26th, 2021. When we volunteered to organize this meeting we had of course been hoping to be able to invite you to Hannover, the city of culture, three universities and excellent Medical Research. Owing to the SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 pandemic we had to change plans and will now use an online or virtual format for this meeting.
The SASRS-CoV-2 pandemic has of course kept most of us very busy throughout 2020 and will continue to do so. The 2021 Annual GfV Meeting will therefore devote enough time to this topic to allow everybody to catch up with the latest developments and to discuss hot issues with experts in this field. We will devote three symposia to this topic and hope to receive many abstracts on SARS-CoV-2 research to presented in workshops as talks or posters. Although the entire scientific programme will be presented online, we will make it possible for a limited number of colleagues to attend the meeting in person, if the restrictions in place in March 2021 will allow us to do so. In particular, we will try to offer both an online platform as well as the opportunity to meet in person for the GfV working groups. In this way we hope to ensure that the 2021 GfV meeting will take place, whatever the pandemic situation in Germany will be in March 2021.
Many scientists and clinicians at the universities (Hannover Medical School, MHH; Hannover Veterinary University; Technical University Braunschweig) and research institutes (Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research, HZI; Twincore Institute for Clinical and Experimental Infection Research; Centre for Individualized Infection Medicine, CIIM) in the Hannover-Braunschweig area contribute to a lively research environment in infection and immunity, which is reflected in our Collaborative Research Centre 900 on Chronic Infections, our Cluster of Excellence RESIST (‘Resolving Infection Susceptibility’) and our involvement in the German Center for Infection Research (DZIF). Colleagues involved in these funding networks have organized the meeting and we hope that we will be able to provide all participants with the same breadth and depth of exciting research that we have become used to in previous GfV Annual Meetings.
On behalf of the organizing committee
Thomas Schulz