Dear SfNIRS members
I wish you all a happy New Year!
As we reflect on 2021, we can all feel pride about our accomplishments in the past year.
Our Society now counts more than 600 members, a 200 member increase with respect to last year. Collectively in 2021 we have published more than 1000 papers on fNIRS, DCS or cerebral oximetry. The virtual conference has been a success with 470 registrations and 260 abstracts. .
Our success would not have been possible without the dedication of all of you, and the commitment and volunteering time of several of you.
I’m taking the opportunity here to personally thank the people that have most contributed to advance the fNIRS society during the past year.
Meryem Yucel, Ilias Tachtsidis, Heather Bortfeld, Haijing Niu and the organizing committee of the fNIRS2021 virtual meeting for planning and delivering an amazing meeting. The program, the quality of the talks, and the discussions were outstanding, and everything run smoothly despite the low financial support. the meeting gave us the opportunity to reconnect after a very challenging period of isolation. Recharged us with new idea and desire to do more.
Felipe Orihuela-Espina, Heather Bortfeld and the rest of the communication committee for keeping us informed with the newsletter and social media posts.
Rickson Mesquita, Thomas Dresler and Felix Scholkmann for running the monthly webinars. Judit Gervain and the educational committee for organizing zoom courses year around.
Luca Pollonini, Rob Luke, Alessandro Torricelli, Ted Huppert, Qianqian Fang, David Boas, Meryem Yucel, Alex v Lühmann, and many other for all the shared software and analysis tools, and guidance over best fNIRS practices.
Joy Hirsch and Turgut Durduran for accepting the challenge and starting a diversity, equity and inclusion committee. While our society has always excelled for inclusion and promoted diversity and equity, I cannot stress enough the importance of finally having a formal committee to support more initiatives.
The board of directors, and in particular Martin Wolf, Stefan Carp and Stacey Ladieu for running the Society in the background. Joe Culver for his vision and new ideas on how to move forward. Clare Elwell for all the support and guidance.
Finally I would like to thank Pepe Dan and the fNIRS 2022 meeting committee for their plans for an awesome conference next year, and all the sponsors that continue to support us despite the delays.
There are so many of you I need to thank this year, and I’m sure I missed some in here.
I really feel blessed and proud to be part of this Society.
I really wish you and yours a happy, healthy, and prosperous 2022!
Mari Franceschini