Letter From the Outgoing President

It is with great joy and pride that I write this ‘last’ letter as President of the IZFS. I am on the flight back from Kyoto, where we all met for the 18th International Zebrafish Conference, reflecting on the past year, and what a year it was!

We have managed to achieve a lot, thanks to the hard work of our Executive group [myself, Kristen Kwan, PhD (Secretary), Feng Liu, PhD (President-Elect), Han Wang, PhD (Treasurer), Kate Whitlock, PhD (Past President) and our management team Nichole Nikolic and Alyssa Gluth], the Board of Directors and some very active members of our key committees (in no particular order: Awards, ED&I, Communications, Webinars, Sustainability, Nominations, Education and Outreach). Together we have  

• Reshaped our webinar series into Zebrafish Global Webinar Series, now led by Suresh Jesuthasan, PhD, taking place monthly with now one ECR and one established group leader and a strong global representation. https://www.izfs.org/education/webinars/webinars-archive 
• Strengthened the concept of IZFS Special Interest Groups (SIG) with our first SIG being the Canadian Zebrafish Research Community.  
• Initiated IZFS/ZDMS/EZS joint activities (Cross-societies Tech. Dev. webinar, joint ED&I activities, joint Sustainability and ECR-Net Committees) with the goal of a joint conference in the future. 
• Formed the Education & Outreach Committee  
• Established connection with our fish husbandry community with the first participation of an IZFS Board member at the International Husbandry Conference.  
• Revised the Awards & created an Outstanding PhD thesis Award starting in 2025. 

Last but not least, we have organised the 18th IZFC Conference in Kyoto, Japan. There were just under 700 zebrafish researchers present in person at the conference, making it the most attended zebrafish international conference since the pandemic. There were only ~60 online participants, similar to the number of online participants at the 2023 EZS-organized conference in Poland. Some reflection is therefore needed on the best shape of online conference offerings in the near future.  It was wonderful to see ECRs and junior lab heads making up most of the conference attendees. It was reassuring to see a diverse mix of researchers across countries, ethnicities and fields of research.  

The resounding success of this conference was the outcome of an unwavering effort from the organizers [Miguel Concha, PhD (Chile), Hiromi Hirata, PhD (Japan), Florence Marlow, PhD (USA), Didier Stainier, PhD (Germany), Tohru Ishitani, PhD (Japan), Han Wang, PhD (China), Karina Yaniv, PhD (Israel), Hitoshi Okamoto, MD, PhD (Co-Chair, Japan) and myself (Chair)].  

I want to particularly emphasize the exceptional commitment of the Japanese members and their local organizing committee, thanks to whom we had a wonderful venue in the middle of a unique historical city, with an amazing performance of Taiko during the end of conference banquet. A special mention must be made of the conference bento box lunches, deemed by most as ‘the best conference food we ever ate’. Not only these were delicious but also incredibly beautiful.   

We are also grateful to all the session chairs who had the difficult task of selecting abstracts to be presented as talks. The presentations were of excellent quality, indicating a continued strong impact of the zebrafish model in research across fields. Two excellent sessions demonstrated the strengths of using multiple animals (comparative biology) and other fish models. These two sessions were extremely well attended, indicating the need to offer these themes at our next conferences.  The prestigious Christiane Nusslein-Volhard and George Streisinger awards were given this year to Steve Wilson, PhD and Judith Eisen, PhD respectively. Both gave outstanding presentations, reflecting their exceptional contributions to zebrafish research and most importantly the roles they both played in generating our current collaborative, diverse set of research leaders.  Our Chi-Bin Chien awardee, D’Juan Farmer, PhD, gave an inspiring presentation on his work and aspiration as a junior group leader.

I am looking forward to our next year. The IZFS is more than ever committed to support our thriving zebrafish research community, with a special dedication to our ECRs, to sustainability of our activities and to visibility of our diverse and culturally rich community. I would therefore urge all of you to encourage your lab members to join the IZFS and to consider our lab membership option.   

As I am stepping down, I also want to sincerely thank, on behalf of our community, the few Board members who are leaving the IZFS, for their effort and dedication (Kristen Kwan, PhD, Kate Whitlock, PhD and our regional reps Ashley Bruce, PhD; Christian Mosimann, PhD; Stephan Neuhauss, PhD; Kirsten Sadler-Edelpi, PhD; and Tanya Whitfield, PhD). A special thank to Kristen Kwan, PhD (outgoing secretary, replaced by Mary Goll, PhD), for her particular effort in developing our interactions with the Zebrafish Husbandry community.  

In the light of our current successes, it is with great optimism that I pass the Presidency to Feng Liu, PhD for a very exciting year ahead.