Bonjour ! As Chair of the Annual Meeting Program Committee (AMPC), it is my sincere pleasure to welcome you to Paris, and the Joint ISMRM-ESMRMB Annual Meeting for 2018. In this city known for its culinary tradition, we’re pleased to offer a smattering of nouvelle cuisine, as well as a pot-au-feu of classic fare.

The meeting follows the same six-day format as last year, officially starting early Sunday evening with the Mansfield Lecture, and finishing on Thursday evening with the closing party – be sure to consult the Program-at-a-Glance for timings.

A notable addition this year is Member Initiated Symposia. These sessions aim to enable anyone from the broader membership – from PhD students to emeritus members – to design and propose content. From nearly 50 proposals, the AMPC selected 24 that complement the existing program and highlight exciting new research directions. This year’s Symposia cover hardware and safety, brain mapping, contrast mechanisms, and clinical research.

Another new tradition is the Presidential Lecture, which brings in a speaker from outside our field to address a major topic of the day. The ISMRM president, Dan Sodickson, has invited Professor Curt Rice, a world-leading expert in gender equality, to educate us on the science of unconscious bias. Building on Prof. Rice’s lecture, we will hold the RESONATE Symposium: an open discussion about unconscious bias within the ISMRM, followed by our annual Women’s Forum.

We welcome the triumphant return of the Secret Sessions! Organized by early-career researchers, aimed at the younger crowd, but open to everyone – these sessions are ISMRM gone guerilla. This year we’ve built you a bigger and better Resonarium for the Secret Sessions in the exhibit hall. You won’t find Secret Sessions in this program – dissemination is through social media and word of mouth. (shhh – it’s a secret!)

John Port and the AMPC have done an outstanding job putting together a superb Educational Program with cutting-edge material to be delivered by the most dynamic speakers in our society. The Educational Program provides a comprehensive review of everything from basic MR physics to translational science and state-of-the-art clinical research. We’re immensely proud of this program, which provides the best MR education anywhere in the world.

Our Named Lectures, delivered by three of our most distinguished and talented members, are sure to be thought-provoking and inspiring. The Mansfield Lecture will be given by Petra S. Hüppi, M.D. (Hôpital des Enfants, Geneva), the Lauterbur Lecture by Gary H. Glover, Ph.D. (Stanford University) and the NIBIB New Horizons Lecture by Michael Lustig, Ph.D. (University of California, Berkeley).

If that isn’t enough to sate your appetite for the latest in MR research, we have an extensive menu of plenaries, special sessions and thematic elements throughout the program. This year, enjoy a cornucopia of MR Value, Machine Learning and Big Data.

When you’ve had your fill of these delicious scientific offerings, enjoy our digestifs. Help us crown the Iron Chef of Public Engagement in our Magnetic Moments competition final in the Resonarium on Thursday afternoon. And once the last lecture is complete, take your inner child by the hand and hop on the bus for what promises to be a truly unforgettable Closing Party at Les Pavillons de Bercy.

I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to the AMPC for their hard work, and I hope you all will join me in thanking the ISMRM central office, who make the annual meeting truly delectable.

Merci !