The UK-CIC virtual conference, 'Collaborative Covid Immunology', took place on 28-29 April and was a huge success! In total, we welcomed over 460 attendees to the conference, and celebrated the success of the consortium over two fascinating days full of talks by many of the UK's leading immunology researchers. We'd like to say a big thank you to all of our speakers, presenters, chairs, and delegates who helped make the conference a success. We'd also like to thank our Management Board, including our Principal Investigator, Professor Paul Moss, and all of our research theme leads, for putting together a fantastic line-up of speakers. Thank you to UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) who funded the conference, and the British Society for Immunology who ran the event. All abstracts are still available to read on the conference website.
We were pleased to welcome Dr Susan Hopkins, Chief Medical Advisor for NHS Test & Trace, to join our plenary session and present a talk on the beginnings of the SIREN study. Speaking on the same day in our session on vaccinology were Professor Teresa Lambe (University of Oxford) and Dr Barney Graham (NIAID), who kindly agreed to present some of their work developing the ChAdOx1 and mRNA vaccines (respectively).
The virtual conference was an excellent showcase of the huge collaborative work done by UK-CIC researchers - immunologists have never been brought together in this way before, and the benefit of having done so was clear to all in attendance. The quality and impact of the research presented was outstanding.
Our Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) panel played a key role in the planning of the conference and shared the impact of their work throughout the event. We asked all presenters to submit both a scientific and a public abstract, and shared profiles of several UK-CIC researchers that showed their personalities and inspiration to study immunology. PPI representative, Tony Kelly, gave an inspiring talk on the PPI perspective on UK-CIC. We also held focused discussions on PPI in chat rooms and captured these conversations as illustrations (see below). Last but not least, PPI members Robert Jasper and Lynn Laidlaw presented a poster on PPI in UK-CIC.
Delegates should now have received an email with a link to a feedback survey. Please do take the time to fill this out and tell us about your experiences at our virtual conference.
