Candida and Candidiasis 2021: a view from Twitter

Posted on April 6, 2021   by Kimberley Ndungu

On 21–27 March, the Microbiology Society hosted Candida and Candidiasis 2021. We’ve turned to Twitter to take a look back at the highlights of the digital event.
 

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With the Focused Meeting having being postponed from 2020 and a full seven-day programme prepared, we were excited to finally be able to welcome everyone to Candida and Candidiasis 2021. It was great to see delegates were just as excited to attend!  


Although we were not able to meet in person this year, a digital event meant delegates could attend from the comfort of their homes and those who would usually not be able to travel could attend too.

 

Following a welcome talk from lead organiser Geraldine Butler, we started with two brilliant keynote talks from Professor Aaron Mitchell and Professor Leah Cowen.

 

Being able to network with your peers is an important part of our Focused Meetings, so to round up day one we invited delegates to a virtual networking session.

 

The first full day of Candida and Candidiasis 2021 started with the Fungal + Host Signalling session, chaired by Al Brown.

 

Chaired by Reeta Rao, we had a Career Development session to conclude the second day. This involved different interactive workshops that were each led by experts in different disciplines and subject areas.

 

With more than 200 posters to view, on Tuesday we hosted the first of three poster presentation sessions.


With so many great posters to visit, we had over 20,000 individual poster views and more than 1,000 individual poster scores.

 

From choosing between posters to choosing between talks; on Wednesday, we started the day with three concurrent scientific sessions: Clinical Sessions, Cool Tools and Molecular Pathogens.

 

Between the scientific sessions, delegates were able to meet and discuss their research further during the meet the speakers sessions.

 

Day five kicked off with talks focusing on drugs and diagnostics, infection models and metabolism.

 

For the final session of the day, both David Roos and Gavin Sherlock gave talks on database presentation.


On the penultimate day of Candida and Candidiasis 2021, David Andes and Jose Lopez-Ribot chaired the Drug Discovery and Resistance session, which featured Kali Iyer’s talk about her work to discover novel antifungals against C. auris.

 

With the week coming to an end, we started the final day with the highly anticipated session, Genome Dynamics, Variation and Evolution.

 

The last scientific session of Candida and Candidiasis 2021, focused on the microbiome. It was then time to announce the poster prize winners.

 

Congratulations to Nicola Case (poster 170B), Jenna Foderaro (poster 194C), Alex Hopke (poster 138C), Ann Kristine Kaune (190B) and Shen-Huan Liang (poster 121B). All their posters are still available to view for delegates on the virtual event platform until 26 April 2021.

Thank you to everyone who attended Candida and Candidiasis 2021, we hope you enjoyed the week!