Why do you think Nice is a destination of choice for congresses?
First, Nice and the French Riviera offer all the necessary infrastructure to host high-profile events like ours: the convention centre is ideally located in the heart of the city, close to the airport (with direct flights to all major European cities and beyond), and there is, of course, a large choice of hotels. The beauty of the region is an added value and a large number of participants can easily be accommodated at any time of the year.
In fact, Nice and the French Riviera are like an internationally recognized brand. More specifically, the Côte d’Azur University, which is partially funded by “Initiative of Excellence” (IDEX) – a program that has identified the top 10 French universities – offers an ideal scientific and academic environment for hosting conferences and building new collaborative networks.
Why is the choice of Nice relevant to your specialty?
The Nice Institute of Chemistry (ICN) hosts a team working in the field of medicinal chemistry, the preferred area of the EFMC, the European Federation of Medicinal Chemistry. We are also active members of the French Society of Therapeutic Chemistry (SCT) which co-organizes the congress and with which we already organized an event in 2013 – the International Conference on Medicinal Chemistry (RICT) attracted 680 participants from 45 different nationalities. The success of this first conference was decisive in winning the organization of this second one.
How do you see your role as an Ambassador?
We are proud to contribute to the reputation of our territory and to show that, beyond its tourism assets, our metropolis is a pioneer in innovation with a university of excellence. As Ambassadors, we want to showcase that, whatever the sector or the size of the event, Nice is the destination of choice for conferences.
What kind of legacy do you hope EFMC- ISMC 2022 will leave?
We would like to be as successful as RICT was in 2013, when the number of participants almost doubled compared to previous editions.
We hope the organization of congresses like ours will emulate other associations to do the same in Nice. In addition, it is an opportunity for us to meet, on site, a very large number of researchers and industry leaders and we also hope to increase our network of academic and private collaborations – after all, we expect more than 1,400 participants from all over the world to come to the Côte d’Azur for this occasion. This will considerably contribute to positioning our Institute and University on a global stage.