By Maria Angela Franceschini and Ippeita Dan

We are excited about the return of our meeting face-to-face! fNIRS 2022 will be held in Boston between October 9th and 12th. As the date for our biennial meeting approaches, the last few months have been hectic. If you have been following us on social media, you surely are aware of some of the goings-on. But if you’ve missed the announcements, the following provides a summary.

The abstract submission deadline is approaching. You can submit your abstracts here, where you will also be able to find an abstract template and author guides. Don’t miss the occasion to present your most recent work to our community. The deadline for abstract submission is June 30th.

The registration for the conference is now open: https://fnirs2022.fnirs.org/registration/. Thanks to the NIH and the industry sponsors, we have been able to lower registration rates with respect to previous meetings!!! Become a SfNIRS member to take advantage of the even lower rates.

Our panel of international speakers is outstanding. We’ll hear from leading researchers, as you’ve come to expect from SfNIRS meetings. Among them is this year’s Keynote Speaker, Prof Joy Hirsch of the Brain Function at Laboratory Yale School of Medicine. We will also hear from Dr Bruce Tromberg, Director of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB).

As per our usual, we will have a Special Session. This year, it will be chaired by Dr Hasan Ayaz and Dr Adrian Curtin from Drexel University, focusing on Neuroergonomics, the study of the brain at work. It is a fascinating topic with a vast number of applications, all related to understanding how the brain works in naturalistic setting with a high degree of ecological validity.

It is time to nominate your favorite early stage investigator. The deadline for the early investigator award nomination is July 15th. Instructions at https://fnirs2022.fnirs.org/awards/early-investigator-award-2022. This year we have made few changes to the award and removed the final competition between three candidates. The awardee will be announced at the conference and she/he will give an invited presentation on his career work.

We have established a new Society award, the SfNIRS Community Award. With this award, the SfNIRS would like to honor a member for its outstanding service to our community. Such service could be in various fields of our community, including:

• Educating community members
• Standardization of equipment, software, or data,
• Organizing events
• Advancing the Society in other ways.

Nominations for this award are now open. Do not miss the occasion to nominate our well deserving members. The deadline for the community award nomination is July 15th. Instructions at https://fnirs2022.fnirs.org/awards/community-award. The award will be presented at the bi-annual SfNIRS conference.

Thank to NIH grant R13NS117007 we have established additional awards to recognizes outstanding contributions to the fNIRS 2022 meeting. We have established:

• 8 Women Excellence in Research Awards to recognize female undergraduate students, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows excellent contributions to the conference program with their presentation or poster
• 8 Posters and Presentations Excellence Awards to recognize undergraduate students, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows excellent contributions to the conference program
• Several DEI travel awards to support and recognize researchers from racial, ethnic, and disabled groups that have been historically under-represented in scientific work related to fNIRS in their home country or internationally.

For a complete list of awards, eligibility, other rules, and deadlines please see https://fnirs2022.fnirs.org/awards/

We have an outstanding list of platinum, gold and silver sponsors: Reality Labs, NIRx, Kernel, Hamamatsu, TechEn, OptoElectronics Components( including MPD, PicoQuant, Quantum Opus, OEC), PioNIRS, Cortivision and Boston Electronics (including Becker & Hickl). They are supporting coffee breaks, reception and special events.

But there is always space for more, in particular we would like to increase the number of travel awards for young underrepresented researchers, women, student and research fellows. These last few years everything had to be virtual, and the new generation of researchers has not yet experience a in-person meeting, meet with their peers around the world, presented their work to a broad audience and discussed their idea and future plans with experts in the field. We want to finally give our young researchers this opportunity, and if you are interested in helping supporting expenses, please send us an e-mail to admin@fnirs.org and become a fNIRS2022 sponsor!!!

Also we have a great list of exhibitors: Artinis, Biopac, Boston Electronics, Cortivision, Gowerlabs, Indus Instruments, ISS Inc, Hamamatsu, NIRx, Obelab, OptoElectronics Components, PioNIRS, Rogue, Seenel Imaging, Spectratech, TechEn, VOX Biomedical. Finally they will be able to show us their latest technology in-person. We so much look forward to see and test all the new products that have been developed in the past few years.

To accommodate more companies we have been able to increase the exhibitor tables from 14 to 18, and after giving 3 tables to our waiting list exhibitors, we still have one spot open. Contact us ASAP if you want to take the last available exhibitor table!!!

The first round of registration for the educational mini-courses will close on june 6. If you haven’t registered yet, we encourage you to take a few minutes to do so. Registration will reopen in July for the mini courses that are not yet sold-out. You can find all the information about the courses, as well as the link to register your preferences, here.