November was a busy month for conferences,
and two of those attended by BioMed Central included the 75th annual meeting of
the American College of Rheumatology and  the Association of Rheumatology
Health Professionals (ACR/ARHP),
 and Neuroscience 2011,
the Society for Neuroscience‘s (SfN) 41st annual meeting.

This year, ACR/ARHP was held in Chicago, Illinois from 5th-9th
November and was attended by over 16,000 delegates. The conference themes
covered all aspects of rheumatology from basic science to clinical
applications, and popular topics included advances in juvenile idiopathic
arthritis (JIA), advances in treatment of gout, osteoarthritis and systemic lupus
erythematosus, as well as
non-pharmacological interventions for musculoskeletal disorders. We met with
many of our board members for Arthritis Research and Therapy,
BMC Musculoskeletal
Disorders, Pediatric
Rheumatology and Journal of Foot and Ankle Research.  Some of our Editorial Board members delivered
stimulating talks on the clinical phenotypes of JIA (Alberto Martini,
Editor-in-Chief of Pediatric
Rheumatology), heart disease and
updated guidelines on rheumatoid arthritis (Jasvinder Singh, Section Editor of BMC
Musculoskeletal Disorders) and Yusuf Yazici (Section Editor of BMC
Musculoskeletal Disorders) discussed the comparative efficacy of biologic
agents in rheumatoid arthritis. In
addition, Editorial Adviser Anthony Woolf who is the current chairman for the
Bone and Joint Decade group, spoke about how to encourage
policymakers to take musculoskeletal conditions seriously.

Neuroscience 2011 was held on the following
week, from 12th-16th November in Washington, DC and was attended by over 32,000
people.This is the ‘must-attend’ event for neuroscientists from all over the
world, and was overseen by the current president of SfN, Susan G Amara, who is
also Editorial Adviser for BMC Neuroscience. Presidential
lectures were delivered by Editorial Advisers for BMC Neuroscience Cori
Bargmann and Mu-ming Poo, and a very well received special lecture on neuronal
networks of motor control  was given by Thomas Jessel.This annual SfN
event is always a great place to meet with our Editorial Board members, and
this year we had the pleasure of meeting many of them, including (but not
limited to) Section Editors for BMC Neuroscience (Robert Gerlai, Anthony
Kline, Maurizio Popoli, Mark Rasenick and Ramesh Raghupathi), as well as
Editors-in-Chief of Journal of Neuroinflammation, Molecular Autism, Molecular Brain,
Molecular
Neurodegeneration, Molecular Pain and Neural
Development.

We hope to see you all again at key
conferences next year!