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!