Background

As an independent UK charity with one objective being to find, fund and facilitate biomedical research into ME, IiMER has, since 2007, been championing the idea and the necessity of international collaboration in research into ME.

The charity has promoted the development of a Centre of Excellence for ME for eight years based on national and international collaboration - something which the NIH have recently vindicated with their awards (see our link - http://www.investinme.org/ce-news-1709-05.shtml) .

Our international Colloquiums were designed from the beginning to create new ideas, new collaborations and new projects by enabling researchers from around the world to interact and work together.

Indeed, Working Together has become the theme of our research Colloquiums.

The Colloquiums have been a success and many good collaborations and new ideas have been generated.

Yet. over the last twelve years, it has often been extremely hard work in getting academic and research institutions, and hospitals, to take an interest in ME. We have managed to do this but there is still a great effort required to maintain this momentum.

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Thinking the Future

To ensure that a foundation of biomedical research into ME can be maintained and to encourage new ideas from new areas then we cannot rely just on the family of researchers that has been built up from all parts of the world. We need to draw in knowledge and expertise from other areas – as we have been doing for many years with our Colloquiums and international conferences.

Importantly, we also need to encourage new researchers – and young researchers.

Now in its eighth year we wish to introduce another level to the Biomedical Research into ME Colloquium to address these points.

In 2018 IiMER will be creating an additional event – provisionally entitled -

Early Career Researchers for ME

This event will take place in London and precede the 8th Biomedical Research into ME Colloquium - a 2 day meeting with top researchers from around the world.

Who Can Participate

An Early Careers Researcher is defined an individual who is within a few years of the award of their PhD or equivalent professional training, or their first academic appointment.

This event will be open to postgraduate students and postdocs involved in biomedical research, and also medical students with an interest in biomedical research into ME.
It will provide an international forum where research into ME can be discussed, ideas can be generated and a network built to allow opportunities for those young or early career researchers who are already involved in research into ME, or involved in another research area which may be of relevance to understanding ME.

All applications for participation will be considered by the committee responsible for planning the agenda, which will include existing young researchers.

Future Development

We foresee that questions or queries or ideas or anything else produced from the Thinking the Future forum would be input to a specific session in the Colloquium on the next day.

This will be an international event in keeping with the emphasis we have placed on international cooperation for the last 10 years.

The young researchers we are funding have promised to help – indeed, we are hopeful that these young and new researchers will run this event.

We also wish to turn this into an international group.

So we have contacted research groups and our friends in other like-minded charities and organisations who have the same objectives as us.

The Thinking the Future Forum will have the opportunity for developing this group of international, early career researchers which will, in turn, facilitate further international collaboration in research into ME and new ideas being formulated.

It will, importantly, also give more awareness of the exciting possibilities of researching this disease – for the betterment of patients and carers.

More details to follow.

We welcome any support for this and will update this page accordingly

Help us Think the Future – for ME

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How to Apply

Use the contact form below to apply to participate and to provide details of your research and why you wish to participate.

All applications will be considered by the committee responsible for planning the agenda.