Congress of the World Public Health Nutrition Association with
Abrasco (the Brazilian Association of Collective Health)
to be held in Rio de Janeiro, 27-30 April 2012
As the video above shows, the state university of Rio de Janeiro, where our Rio2012 will take place, is a vertical campus. It includes five main buildings with more than 290 classrooms, 12 libraries and 24 auditoriums, as well as important spaces dedicated to cultural activities, such as theatres and art galleries. We are planning the best use of this space to make it easy and pleasant to move around between sessions and enjoy these facilities, including cultural activities.
Congress themes
We now have a team of senior and younger public health and nutrition professionals working on the definition of themes for our congress. But the idea is to be interactive, and truly democratic. During the previous world public health nutrition congress in Porto, last September, we received many suggestions for themes and topics. The congress programme committee is taking all those suggestions into consideration. We expect to have them published in the next couple of months, so that you can start preparing your abstracts!
Interactivity
As we said in February, we will be making good use of electronic technology to improve the experience of our congress. Daily sessions will be available online in both Portuguese and English. We will also have facilities to enable the participation of people who cannot be physically present in Rio. We are also planning activities to ensure maximum interaction and communication between speakers and participants for the entire duration of the congress. As well as plenaries, symposiums, and round tables, there will be three-day workshops, presentation of hot topics, debates on controversial issues, and action groups. An overall theme of our congress, as you can see, is knowledge – policy – action. Stay tuned, it's all happening!
Youth
The Association is committed to engaging young public health and nutrition professionals, so that they play a full part in the process and do not feel overshadowed or intimidated by more experienced professionals. We welcome ideas and the participation of active young professionals. We intend also to engage them in the organisation of the congress. We already have a group of MSc and PhD students working with us. We expect more to come. Further, we plan to build into the congress processes that will build the capacity of less resourced professionals, in Brazil and internationally.
We will be publishing more information about Rio2012 next month and every month this year.
Sabrina Ionata de Oliveira
General Secretary
