By Linxin Li and Diana Aguiar de Sousa on behalf of the YSPR committee

This time last year, we were calmly looking forward to welcoming the year 2020. To our surprise, 2020 has been extraordinary. Our vocabulary is enriched with new gloomy terms such as COVID-19, quarantine and lockdown. Masks and Teams/Zoom meetings have become the new norm and many of our activities have moved virtual. Reassuringly, despite having to be physically apart, our community has never been so close together. With everyone’s generous commitment and continuous support, we managed to keep the blog running. As usual, in the last ESO blog of the year, we take the opportunity to summarise some of the highlights of the year.

At the beginning of 2020, ten talented young stroke physicians and researchers received the award from the ESO Department-to-Department Visiting Programme for a short visit to a specialised stroke centre outside their home countries. Although some of the visits are yet to happen due to delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the new round is already open for application. If you are interested, check it out now.

During 2020, ESO blog continued to thrive and we have covered a wide range of topics with our Friday Educational Corner in over 40 blog posts, ranging from study methodology, clinical pearls to frontiers research. We continued to provide simultaneous highlights on high-impact studies published in the European Stroke Journal and have introduced two new series of interviews where we invited rising stars of the field to discuss topics of their expertise. Have a read of some of the “ASK the EXPERT(s)” and “Catch up over coffee” stories. If you are interested in our blog posts or if you are keen to join us for writing blog posts for 2021, please drop us an email (esoinfo@eso-stroke.org).

Finally, at the end of 2020, we had our first virtual ESO-WSO YSPR Research Design Workshop with four young researchers presenting and discussing their projects with prominent world leaders in the field. If you are interested, please read their experiences here. We hope that we will be able to meet up in person at ESOC 2021 in Helsinki, Finland next year.

With the vaccine for COVID-19 around the corner, we are desperate to wave goodbye to the bumpy yet still fruitful 2020. Tremendous thanks to our committee members and many other people in the big ESO family, without whom none of the above activities would have been possible!

Keep warm and have a safe holiday!

See you in 2021!