The LRI Secretariat attended the 21st ILC in Hyderabad, India last week; an event of great importance to all involved in the elimination of leprosy.
It was a pleasure meeting many of our grantees, partners and committee members in-person as well as to create new valuable connections with stakeholders in the field of leprosy. Our booth received lots of visitors expressing interest in LRI’s work, the research funding opportunities and capacity strengthening activities. We also proudly displayed an overview of the many presentations of LRI-funded researchers sharing their project findings at the physical or online congress, and the prize for ‘Best paper’ was awarded to one of them: Congratulations to Dr Anuj Mavlankar and team!
In collaboration with the Global Partnership for Zero Leprosy, LRI organised the plenary session “Money matters: Priorities in funding leprosy research” to provide an overview of the research funding landscape in leprosy and encourage synergy and discussion. Our Coordinator, Dr Suzan Trienekens, presented LRI’s scope of research support and funding priorities. In addition to presentations of several organisations involved with leprosy research, there were interactions with the audience through online poll voting. We were excited to see that the researchers in the audience voted LRI as the main organisation for their research funding support in the last 5 years.