After a pandemic-related pause, in-person conference attendance is back, which means the Editors of Nature Reviews Gastroenterology & Hepatology are back to regular travel and attendance at conferences and meetings worldwide. If you see us at a conference, do come and say hello!

As Editors of a Nature Reviews journal, it is our job to keep up to date with the latest research and track key trends and hot topics within gastroenterology and hepatology, and in science and medicine in general. In addition to regularly reading the literature, we also go to conferences, attending a range of sessions from keynote lectures to wandering the poster hall to get a feel for what topics we should cover next and, crucially, who we should invite to write for us. Sometimes the Editors are not just attendees but are also involved as speakers in a session, panel members or part of informal ‘meet the editor’ sessions. The types of conference we attend vary, from large-scale medical meetings with many thousands of people in attendance to smaller, more focused basic science symposia with a few hundred attendees. Each offers a different experience for the Editor.

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While at the conference, we also have one-to-one meetings with researchers from across all career stages. During these informal chats, we might talk about emerging trends that are not quite ready for discussion in a main conference session or discuss unpublished research or next-planned projects. We also love to hear about the people behind the research and are keen to discover about rising stars in the field, people’s future plans and where they might be heading for their next research or clinical post. These conversations give us crucial insights that just listening to a presentation cannot provide.

“The types of conference we attend vary, from large-scale medical meetings … to smaller, more focused basic science symposia”

Another way for the Editors to make a more personal connection with researchers is during lab or hospital visits. These typically involve an Editor visiting a specific department or institute, meeting several researchers during the day and often giving a talk about science publishing or science writing, which we tend to tailor specifically for early-career researchers. Our talks are an opportunity for us to give back to the community and hopefully give attendees a behind-the-scenes look at what we do as Editors, tips on science writing and advice on navigating science publishing; we can also give careers talks to provide insights into alternative careers in science beyond research.

Our conference calendar for 2024 is already filling up. In the first quarter of 2024 alone, Editors will be attending ECCO ‘24 (Stockholm, Sweden), a Keystone on Microbiota and Cancer immunity (Taipei, Taiwan) and APASL 2024 (Kyoto, Japan), as well as lab visits in Hong Kong and Tokyo, Japan. Later in the year, you will see us at DDW 2024 (Washington, DC, USA), EASL Congress 2024 (Milan, Italy) and EPC 2024 (Santiago, Spain), with travel for the latter half of 2024 still to be confirmed, including hopefully lab visits closer to ‘home’ (our editorial offices) in the UK and Germany. Watch out for tweets from the conferences, and we often write Research Highlights on the meetings themselves to summarize take-home points for our readers1.

We always announce our conference attendance on X (formerly known as Twitter; @NatRevGastroHep) and our DMs are open, but you can also contact the journal by email at nrgasthep@nature.com if you would like to meet with one of the Editors at a conference or are interested in setting up a lab visit or careers talk. Do also let us know if you are organizing a conference; we are always keen to try new meetings, big or small.