New destination and dates
Wednesday, August 31st, 2022
Dear Colleagues and Friends,
On behalf of the Board of the International Papillomavirus Society (IPVS), we would like to announce that, due to the current COVID19-related travel restrictions in Japan, the 35th International Papillomavirus Conference & Basic, Clinical and Public Health Scientific Workshops. (IPVC 2023) will be relocated to Washington DC, USA, from Monday, April 17 to Friday, April 21, 2023.
The borders in Japan currently remain closed to foreign individual travelers. Tourist visa waivers are at this stage not available. Japan reopened its borders to groups of travelers on guided tours (travel made via a Japanese travel agency) on June 10th, it remains closed to individual travelers. It remains unknown when individual travelers will be able to obtain a visa and enter Japan again, for example for a conference.
IPVS and the organisers were under serious time pressure relating to the contracts and resulting financial commitments that had a fixed date for agreement. A decision had to be made either to proceed with Kyoto and the risk that delegates could not enter the country for the meeting or change the location. It was felt strongly that IPVS needed to make a decision by the end of August 2022 to deliver an in-person conference around March or April 2023. Our community is expecting a face-to-face conference and has made plans to attend it, hear lectures from experts, participate in discussions, meet their peers and present their work.
After a thorough review of various potential alternative destinations, Washington DC (USA) was identified as an adequate city to relocate IPVC 2023 to. Moving out of Japan was not an easy decision, and we are saddened that we will not be in Kyoto in 2023 as planned. We truly hope to be able to return to Japan for a future IPVC edition.
We hope that this decision will allow as many participants as possible to attend IPVC 2023 and finally meet in-person since our last face-to-face conference was in Sydney in 2018.
Our intention is to keep the current state-of-the-art scientific program as close to its latest version, with only minimal changes. We plan to build upon the incredible amount of hard work from the Committee which has already gone into the conference preparations and offer a productive and rewarding experience to the IPVS community.
Suzanne Garland and Toshiyuki Sasagawa will remain the Co-Chairs of IPVC 2023. Official announcements are currently being sent out. If you have submitted an abstract, you will be contacted in the coming days. The abstract submission deadline will be extended further. The exact timeline will be shared shortly. The IPVC 2023 website will also be updated in the coming weeks with the revised details.
Please do not hesitate to reach out to us if you have any question. For any conference related matter, you can also use the contact form here.
Best regards,
Prof. Suzanne Garland and Prof. Toshiyuki Sasagawa
IPVC 2023 Co-Chairs