Next RDD Europe will be in Athens, Greece

At the end of the 2011 RDD Europe conference in Berlin, co-organizers RDD Online and Aptar Pharma announced that the next RDD Europe meeting will take place in Athens, Greece at the Athens Hilton Hotel, May 21-24, 2013.

Aptar Pharma’s Pierre Carlotti explains that the organizers are making an effort to choose varied locations for the RDD Europe conference, and they felt that the sunny weather in the southern part of the continent might have particular appeal. Average daytime temperatures for Athens in May are in the low 70s on the Fahrenheit scale (low 20s C).

The number of suitable locations is more restricted in Europe than in the US, Carlotti says. “The problem we have – and it’s a good problem,” he notes, “is that the conference is getting larger and larger.” A record 465 delegates attended the Berlin meeting.

With the growing numbers of attendees, finding a hotel that can accommodate the meeting becomes more difficult, but the organizers are committed to maintaining an intimate atmosphere, says Carlotti: “What we want to keep is the spirit of a very professional conference, science driven, with excellent quality, but also the sense of all the people belonging somehow to a family.” In light of that, he continues, “We would like to continue the practice of having everybody under one roof, which means not choosing a convention center.”

The first two RDD Europe meetings, in 2005 and 2007, took place in Paris, with the 2009 meeting in Lisbon. Feedback from delegates to those meetings indicated that they enjoyed having everyone under one roof and found the hotel settings more convenient than having to travel from one location to another.

The number of hotels in Europe, however, that can accommodate more than 450 people in a single meeting room, plus have a 1200 sq. m. space for the technology and poster exhibition space, plus have 12 rooms available for the workshops which have become a hallmark of the European meetings, is limited.

“In the US, we can choose from maybe 30 resorts, where if you need more space you can just open up another room, but in Europe we don’t find the equivalent at this time,” says Carlotti. Europe, he notes, has a few large resorts, “but they are in the middle of nowhere and I think that may be a difficult aspect for logistics.”

Only 70% of the delegates at the 2011 meeting came from within Europe, with 22% traveling from the US and 8% from the rest of world. Many of attendees coming from Asia, Latin America, or the west coast of the US already have to take three flights to get to the meeting, and Carlotti thinks that adding another travel segment would be too much. As a result, the organizers consider only locations in city centers, ruling out resorts.

The Athens Hilton features 22 meeting rooms, more than enough for the workshops, and the larger rooms can easily accommodate all of the delegates for the exhibitions and podium presentations. Located in downtown Athens, the hotel is convenient to the airport and features views of the Acropolis.

RDD Europe has maintained several differences from the US versions of the meetings in addition to the types of locations and the smaller attendance, with a more compressed time period and the inclusion of the workshops. Carlotti suspects that many of the delegates who attend both versions of the meeting like the variety, knowing that the European meeting is not just a “copy and paste” version of the US conference.

The workshop sessions date to 2004, prior to the meeting’s inclusion as part of the RDD brand. In 2002, device supplier Valois (a division of Aptar Pharma), organized its first scientific meeting in Paris. The conference was an overwhelming success, with 110 people in a room meant to hold 80, Carlotti remembers.

Those 110 people provided good feedback, he says, and some of those attendees asked, ”Why don’t you create some breakout sessions where it would be more hands on as opposed to only the podium presentations?” The workshops made their debut at the next Valois conference, in 2004, in Delray Beach, Florida.

“To us it was a way to bring together those people from different environments,” says Carlotti; ”It’s like cooking, like different ingredients, a bit of chemistry, a bit of physics, maybe a bit of processing, maybe filling, and the conference, and the workshop in particular was a way to put together all of these elements — like a jigsaw puzzle.” When Valois was approached by RDD, it only made sense to combine forces because RDD was very successful, with an established brand, and the European meetings retained the earlier format.

Carlotti thinks that members of the OINDP community may be unaware that they have the opportunity to submit proposals for workshops, “that it’s an open system,” similar to the proposals for posters and podium presentations. Organizers will issue a call for workshops for the Athens meeting in April 2012.

Note: The next US RDD meeting will take place in Phoenix, Arizona, May 13-17, 2012.