This was possibly the largest ME/CFS meeting I had ever been to, which indicates how fast the research field is growing. There were 4 days of talks from before 9am until after 6pm every day and the talks were kept to around 20 minutes each.

It began on Tuesday the 28th of May with the young investigator conference coined “Thinking the Future”, an initiative started at the Invest in ME conference last year and elaborated upon at the NIH meeting just a couple of months ago. I was pleasantly surprised by the number of PhD students and the depth of their presentations.

We discussed the paths to take for a future career in ME/CFS, the methods we could use to maintain momentum and how to keep the young investigators encouraged to move forward.

Many young investigators commented that patient engagement was a strong source of positive experiences for them, so I would like to openly acknowledge and thank those patients that contact researchers the world over. The mutual benefits of researcher-patient interaction are truly remarkable.