Dear Friends, dear Colleagues,

It is with great pleasure that I invite you to our next Annual Scientific Meeting of the Association of Embryo Technologies in Europe. This year, however, we go nowhere, we stay home. The corona virus obliged us to adapt our annual habits and forced us to look for a valuable alternative. It was not an easy decision taken by the board, to cancel our annual meeting. The local organizing committee in Dublin, chaired by Patrick Lonergan was very well prepared and ready to welcome us in a wonderful conference venue. However, these efforts will not be lost as we postponed our annual meeting with one year. So, our next (physical) AETE meeting will take place in Dublin at September 8-9 (Wednesday and Thursday), 2021. Please block your agendas and inform your network.

The board of the AETE unanimously decided to provide an online alternative for 2020; we call it AETElite. We want to maximize the opportunity for our young researchers to submit an abstract and to give an online presentation. We do realize that this is important for their scientific career. About 60 abstracts were submitted and accepted for publication in Animal Reproduction and for presentation during our AETE-lite meeting. 35 of these abstracts were submitted as “oral presentation” showing the high need for the authors to interactively present their work. Our AETE-lite meeting tries to cover that need and will take place on Thursday 10 and Friday 11 September. The first day will be a rather “silent” day where all registered participants can virtually walk in their own time along the uploaded posters and materials submitted by the sponsors. Friday will be the interactive day, in real time. We are still working very hard to make this practically possible and we will soon come with more details. In short, there will be real-time oral presentations, time for interaction and a general assembly. The best oral presentation will win an AETE-lite award! Do not forget that if you would like to participate in our AETE-lite meeting (be it as a presenter or as a delegate), that you will have to register through our website.We very much look forward to meeting you!

And of course, we have the keynote speakers. It was decided to postpone our main program together with the pioneer award winner with one extra year. Their interesting papers however, will be published in this summer volume of Animal Reproduction. I sincerely thank all speakers for making their agenda available in September 2021.

Also during this very difficult year, the intense collaboration between AETE and SBTE is very well appreciated by the board and all members. As you know, this year we jointly publish already for the sixth time our abstract proceedings and invited lectures in Animal Reproduction. At the Affiliated Society meeting at IETS 2020 (New York), this collaboration and joint publication efforts between AETE and SBTE were mentioned and really appreciated.

Finally, we cannot underestimate the great importance of our Sponsors in our Society. We are very grateful that following sponsors stayed on board this year, even without any physical meeting in September: (9th June 2020):

Main: [Vetoquinol]; General: [Ceva Santé Animal]; Exhibitors: [Bodinco/ICP]; [EGG TECH]; [IMV]; [Failte Ireland]; [IVF Bioscience]; [IVFtech;] Supporter: [Hermitage Technologies]; Friends: [Dovea Genetics]; [Vitricell]. Stay with us for the latest updates and practicalities about our AETE-lite meeting at www.aete.euand I hope to welcome you all in our digital meeting room.

Jo Leroy, President
of the AETE 12 June 2020