Planning for a changing future

What does the future look like? One thing’s for sure: not what it looked like two years ago. So much has changed. For millions of us, the corona pandemic has significantly changed the way we work, how we live, and how we interact with technology. Any suggestion too that things might return to ‘normal’ once the pandemic is (eventually) behind us run up against the other, even greater crisis we face: the climate emergency. Corroborating the IPCC’s warnings, this seemed to enter a new and darker phase in 2021, with extreme weather events wreaking havoc in several countries across Europe.

How should ECNP confront this changing world? For an association that exists to bring people together it presents a major challenge, because the face-to-face interaction that is so crucial for scientific exchange, education, and professional development is unlikely, going forward, to be possible in the ways we’ve become so used to.

To confront this challenge, we’ve formed two Executive Committee-level task forces – one on Innovation, the other on Sustainability – to map out how ECNP can continue to deliver on its mission in a way that embraces our climate responsibility and thinks innovatively about the new possibilities advancing technology is opening up. Part of this process will be reviewing our operating and governance models, and looking at how we can streamline and become more efficient, better matching our expenditure to impact, and focusing with renewed precision on where ECNP can make the most meaningful and lasting contributions to European brain research and treatment science. In this way we hope to make ECNP as ready as it can be – structurally and financially – to meet the world of tomorrow, and whatever that world may bring.

In a similar spirit of renewal and regeneration we’ve also revised the College’s visual identity, and it’s my pleasure to be able to reveal for the first time the new ECNP logo. The current logo has served us honourably since ECNP’s founding 34 years ago. But we were looking for something that better captured the boldness of the College and its aspirations, and was less narrowly tied to European geography. I’m very pleased with the result:

The holiday season is typically a time for renewal and reflection – for taking stock of the year past and looking to the year ahead. I hope that you too have a chance to re-charge and re-group. And I look forward to continuing to work together for European brain health in 2022.

Stay healthy, and merry Christmas!

Gitte Moos Knudsen
ECNP President