History of the HFP meetings

A first series of Euresco conferences on “Human Fungal Pathogens” funded by the European Science Foundation were organized by Angel Dominguez (Salamanca, Spain), Joachim F. Ernst (Düsseldorf, Germany) and Alistair Brown (Aberdeen, UK) and held in Spain (Grenada, 1999), Austria (Seefeld, 2001), and France (Giens, 2003), In 2005, the first FEBS Advanced Lecture Course on Human Fungal Pathogens (HFP2005), was organized in La Colle-sur-Loup. It was chaired by Christophe d’Enfert and co-chaired by Anita Sil and Steffen Rupp. Since then, this meeting took place every two years, chaired or co-chaired by Christophe d’Enfert, Anita Sil, Steffen Rupp, Carol Munro, Alex Andrianopoulos, Jessica Quintin, Patrick Van Dijck, Ana Traven, Oliver Kurzai, Elaine Bignell, Michael C. Lorenz and Guilhem Janbon. Over the years, the course attendance ranged from 165-210 participants, including 105-125 PhD students and post-doctoral fellows and 28-33 lecturers. These HFP meetings were all held in La Colle-sur-Loup in May, allowing international students and postdocs to meet the most prominent scientists in the field during 5 days in the South France. Consistently, the courses were rated very highly by almost all participants and there was a strong demand for the continuation of this conference format on a bi-annual basis. This meeting has become a classic and some former students at HFP courses are now PIs and still come back at each edition. As stated by one member of our Scientific Advisory Board, this course “has become one of the unifying activities in the field bringing together investigators of different fields of fungal pathogenesis from abroad with those in Europe”.