As the newly appointed Editorial Director of WCSFP, I am just starting to navigate the challenges of curating some exciting and stimulating sessions which will help us all get to grips with the precarious future of our industry. 

In the meantime, here are some reasons why you should be putting Tallinn, November 9th to 12th into your diary. As a long term fan of WCSFP, I went to one of the first ever, held in Hong Kong in 1994. I have been to 26 since and I can say that no country is as exciting to fans of science and history as Estonia. I was lucky to visit Tallinn in 2014 and it’s a city steeped in culture and history: from the constant recognition of different filming locations from Christopher Nolan's Tenet, to a Hanseatic old town reminiscent of Game of Thrones, to the many close encounters with the most audacious sea gulls I've ever met. There's one called Steven who even has his own instagram account, 'tallinnseagull'.

For fans of marine engineering there's a chance to get on board a very special submarine, the EML Lembit, built in Barrow in Furness, Cumbria in 1936 for the independent Estonian navy. She was taken over by the Soviet Navy in 1940 as a mine layer. Finally returned to a newly independent Estonia in 1994, she was by then the oldest submarine still afloat in the world. You can wander her very tight corridors in the Tallinn Seaplane Maritime Museum. 

And Tallinn is a city where history feels very real. Only 200km from the Russian border, the old town is dominated by the enormous Russian orthodox Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, built by the last Tsar of Russia. That's the Alexander Nevsky, saint of the Russian orthodox church, and the brutal military commander of the 13th century who beat the German Teutonic Knights in the Battle on the Ice. Nevsky is now used by Putin as a religious justification for his war In Ukraine. There's been debate in Tallinn over the years whether to rename the cathedral or even demolish it, but it still stands, a monument to Russian imperial supremacy and a tourist attraction that's the very definition of historical complexity. 

So yes, there are plenty of reasons to come to Tallinn this November. But perhaps the main one is that WCSFP has always been at its best when it brings people together in places that make us think differently about science, history and the stories we tell about the world around us. Tallinn feels like one of those places.

-- Sara Ramsden, Editorial Director

Registration is now open for WCSFP in Tallinn, Estonia this 9-12 November! Click here to register.