Our 39th annual Society for Endocrinology BES conference was scheduled to be held in Harrogate on 16-18 November but as the COVID-19 pandemic progressed, it became clear that it was unsafe and not practical to hold the meeting in person, even though November was several months away. In fact, the conference centre in Harrogate remains a Nightingale Hospital and we were actually in the midst of lockdown 2.0 during the conference.

Whilst we were unable to meet in person, the Society for Endocrinology team felt that it was more important than ever to connect our endocrine community, and worked hard to bring you the very best from the SfE BES programme in a new free-to-members virtual meeting. Our digital meeting programme was designed to feature the most exciting content including the inaugural Presidential Lecture from Professor Robert Lefkowitz, the Medal and Prize Lectures, the ‘What is New?’ session, a special COVID-19 and Endocrinology session. We also had invaluable content from our sponsors and updates within each Endocrine Network community.

The digital world of conferences was all new to the SfE BES team, and a huge learning curve. We extend our apologies to delegates that experienced technical issues in accessing the live content and thank you for your patience, understanding and support of SfE BES. We hope this didn’t detract from the informative and outstanding endocrinology presented during the week.

You can now catch up with all the sessions on demand in the Members’ Area until November 2021. A huge thank you to all our speakers, chairs and exhibitors who were so flexible and helpful as we navigated our way through the teething difficulties.

We hope to see you all, in person, at SfE BES 2021, for the very best clinical and scientific endocrine research, and to connect in our ‘new normal’.