Some of you may remember that in my last letter I highlighted our Handbook series and its current volume which is being written as you read. I am recently back from our workshop assembled from contributors to this and others in Aarhus, Denmark convened by Professor Hatice Tankisi. It makes one realise just how much expertise there is within our community. It also reinforced how important it is to continue the Handbook series, to provide definitive accounts of the many different areas we cover and to publish these in our journals accessibly too all, both to widen access to knowledge, but also it must be said to maintain our journals’ Impact Factors.
As we close another call for IFCN Fellowship applications, it is my pleasure to share that several of our past fellowship winners have published papers. Mario Prado, a 2023 Education Fellowship winner from the Philippines has published two papers, Chronologic Changes in Transcranial Motor Evoked Potential During Anterior Temporal Lobectomy in Patients with Temporal Lobe Epilepsy: A Single-Center Cross-Sectional Analytic Study, and, Switching carbamazepine to lacosamide improves gamma-glutamyl transpeptidase levels. Aayeshi Soni, a 2024 Education Fellowship winner from South Africa has published Diagnosis and Management of Adult Status Epilepticus while Melody Asukile, a 2021 Education Fellowship winner from Zambia has published Long-term seizure and quality of life outcomes of an epilepsy surgery program in Cape Town, South Africa. Congratulations to all and we look forward to hearing from other Fellowship winners about their successes. As you may know we have been tweaking our Fellowships, decreasing the usual time of support but thereby allowing us to support more people from a wider distribution of countries. We also plan to keep in touch with our Fellows to see how their careers develop.
In the last month I also attended the first meeting of the Organising Committee of the International Congress 2026 and the first meeting of the scientific committee of the ICCN2026, co-chaired by Jorge Guterriez and Hatice Tankisi. It is planned to involve our Special Interest Groups as well as our colleagues in Colombia and others in the development of the programme. Please watch for announcements of the calls for Symposia and Abstracts later this year. And of course, SAVE THE DATE; The 34th International Congress of Clinical Neurophysiology 2026 will be held in Cartagena, Colombia at Centro de Convenciones Cartagena de Indias on 8-12 September 2026.
One of my personal highlights from the Jakarta ICCN, apart from hitting the gong to commence the congress, was a lecture from Professor Nens van Alfen from Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, the Netherlands on Neuralgic amyotrophy. I am therefore delighted that we have persuaded her to give a Masterclass on this topic. The condition is more common and more amenable to (early) treatment than often presumed. The Masterclass is this weekend, on Saturday May 17, 2025. She is a neurologist and clinical neurophysiologist and a great lecturer. So please register and attend the lecture, whatever time it is for you. If not this weekend, then be sure to catch up with it when online.
This month’s letter is short. Time will tell, dear reader, if this is a trend or an aberration
Best wishes,
Jonathan Cole