The COR-NTD Planning Committee is developing a multiple year meeting strategy, based on input from the NTD community. In the following sections, we will discuss details of this year's meeting and our plans for the future.

COR-NTD Annual Meeting

Meeting in Person,Virtual, or Hybrid

Following the lifting of restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic, we have considered multiple conferencing models to address issues of meeting access, travel equity, internet bandwidth, geographic representation, and delegate representation. This will include hybrid plenary sessions, in-person breakout sessions, and a virtual Innovation Lab.

Our decision to make the plenaries hybrid aims to facilitate accessibility for those attending both virtually and in-person. Breakout sessions will be held in-person to optimize discussion but will be recorded and made available after the meeting. As for the Innovation Lab, we have opted to keep that feature virtual so that the largest number of innovators and participants are able to participate.

Invitation List

We are increasingly mindful of who gets invited to the Annual COR-NTD Meeting. Historically, the Annual Meeting has been closed due to the nature of its format, constraints of in-person space capacity, and of course the generous support from donors which has kept this meeting free of registration fees. Those who request to be added to the Annual COR-NTD Meeting invitation list must be working in the NTD community; as the goal of the meeting is to foster collaboration and to drive the research agenda. All members of the NTD community are welcome to apply for an invitation to the COR-NTD meeting. If you have been on the invitation list in the past, you do not need to re-apply.

Over the last few years, we have been able to add more invitees and participants thanks to the virtual platform. As this has created a great level of accessibility to colleagues worldwide, we will continue to offer parts of the meeting in a virtual manner to include as much of the community as possible in plenary sessions. With that in mind, many have experienced the benefit of in person interactions and meetings for better collaboration, and therefore some aspects of the meeting will remain in person.

Breakout sessions

Topics for breakout sessions will be solicited from the community via a call for proposals. This call was launched early April on the COR-NTD website, cor-ntd.org, and is now closed. The selection process for these sessions has historically been managed by the COR-NTD secretariat and donors, with the aim of generating a diverse pool of strong sessions that represent the disease and subject matter interests of the coalition that directly address known gaps in NTD elimination/control strategies. In an effort to be more inclusive, this year we issued a call for those who would like to apply to be on the breakout review committee. Click here for more information on what this entailed.

Successful breakout proposals will be focused on research topics of interest to the global NTD community and designed to move the operational research agenda forward. As in previous years, breakouts will include research result presentations. Additionally, breakout sessions must also include the opportunity for discussion of the research to inform next steps. Our breakout session review criteria strive for gender, racial, geographic, and subject matter diversity. Similarly, we embed principles of inclusion and diverse representation in our choices of panelists for plenaries, ensuring an equitable balance of gender, racial, geographic, and subject matter diversity. 

Geography and Time Zones

This year, we will maintain the 2023 COR-NTD Annual Meeting connected     to the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (ASTMH) and the meeting will take place two days prior to ASTMH on October 16-17. In the past, COR-NTD was linked to ASTMH so that those traveling to one meeting could benefit by attending both with one associated travel cost. This meeting has typically therefore taken place in North America.

In order to provide more equitable and convenient accessibility to endemic countries, we will begin to hold regional meetings, starting in 2023. More details will come. 

In coming years, we are eager to explore opportunities for additional regional conferences in Africa, the South Pacific and South America. In spite of the fact that we do not want to lose the main benefits of COR-NTD, which brings together the NTD community to share research and solutions, your feedback indicates interest in a regional approach which will allow us to strengthen even further intra-regional connections and address challenges specific to those regions.

Other Convening Opportunities

Realizing that we are constrained by time at the Annual Meeting, we will continue to offer Research Links Series virtually in 2023 to provide partners with a means to share research outputs and discuss how to use that research to move the NTD agenda forward. A new call for 2023 Research Links sessions will be launched late spring. Selected sessions will be announced in June.

Please continue to check this space for more updates and discussions surrounding the COR-NTD Convening strategy in the future. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to reach us at ntd-sc@taskforce.org.