Nuha Yassin © ECCO

Dear ECCO Friends and Colleagues,

With the festive break and end of year approaching rapidly, what better way to have our final ECCO News interview for 2024 than make it a celebratory one. We celebrate the spirit of ECCO, the collaboration, the multidisciplinary approach and the friendships by speaking to our new General Secretary, Professor Edouard Louis. During this interview you will get reacquainted with Professor Louis and share his vision for ECCO. We hope you enjoy the interview and learn of ways to get involved with ECCO. There is no better time than the present to get involved with ECCO as the society builds on its wide global reach. Wishing you a fabulous time with your friends and families. See you in Berlin in 2025.

Best Wishes,

Nuha Yassin

Consultant Colorectal Surgeon

ECCO News Associate Editor

Nuha Yassin © Nuha Yassin

It’s a great honour to introduce you to ECCO’s Scientific Officer, Professor Ailsa Hart. Ailsa is a Consultant Gastroenterologist and the IBD lead at St Mark’s Hospital, Harrow, London. Ailsa has been an active member at ECCO for many years and has been a great supporter of several initiatives. She has won the hearts and minds of many within and outside ECCO with her calm demeanour, hard work and bright outlook.

We hope you enjoy listening to this uplifting interview with Ailsa who gives us a sunny forecast during these challenging times. Please click on the audio link below:

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Nuha Yassin © Nuha Yassin

It gives me great pleasure to introduce you to ECCO’s new Treasurer, Professor Janneke van der Woude. Janneke is a Consultant Gastroenterologist at the Erasmus University Medical Centre in Rotterdam. She is the clinical lead for the IBD unit and has published widely in the field. As a very active ECCO Committee and Executive Board Member since its infancy, we are really excited to get to know Prof Van Der Woude more.

The interview will comprise of a personal introduction, insights into Janneke’s professional life, her ECCO journey, some hot topic discussions and what’s in store for the future. We hope you enjoy listening to this interview by clicking on the audio link below:

Ignacio Catalán-Serra © ECCO

Fernando Magro is Consultant in Gastroenterology and Director of Pharmacology at the University Hospital São João Porto, Portugal. In addition Fernando is also Associate Editor of the UEG Journal and founder of the Portuguese IBD Group. As he started his term as new Education Officer at ECCO'20 we wanted to provide the ECCO News readers with an exclusive interview with him.

Once more, the interview was recorded and can be listened to by clicking on the button below. We hope you will enjoy the introduction to ECCO's Education Officer.

Ignacio Catalán-Serra, ECCO News Associate Editor

Ignacio Catalán-Serra © ECCO

Britta Siegmund is Medical Director of the Medical Department, Division of Gastroenterology, Infectiology and Rheumatology at the Charité - University Hospital Campus Benjamin Franklin Berlin, Germany. She has recently been accredited with the position of the new President-Elect of ECCO and we were happy to conduct an exclusive interview with her.

For the convenience of our ECCO News readers we recorded the interview and put it in an audio file. We hope you will enjoy listening to interesting facts about our President-Elect.

Ignacio Catalán-Serra, ECCO News Associate Editor

Pieter Hindryckx © ECCO

Willem Bemelman

Position: Secretary 2018–2020

Nationality: Dutch

Born: December 17, 1958

Past ECCO Positions: 
     • Co-founder of S-ECCO
     • S-ECCO Chair
     • Chair, Surgical ECCO Guidelines on Crohn’s Disease

Laurent Peyrin-Biroulet © ECCO

I am happy to inform all ECCO members that the Governing Board started working while everybody was still on the plane! This year, we arrived on Friday afternoon and could already discuss numerous points. First, it was decided to continue increasing the amount of money for grants to foster exchange across ECCO centres and support innovative scientific projects.