ID Week Brings Education, Networking and Conference Events Altogether Into One Conference

IDWeek 2025 has commenced and with it comes the annual opportunity to be exposed to education, a chance to see old friends and experience conference events. IDWeek Chair, Infectious Diseases Society of America, Yohei Doi, MD, professor of Medicine and director of the Center for Innovative Antimicrobial Therapy at the University of Pittsburgh and professor of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases at Fujita Health University says its an opportunity to reconnect with peers.

"It's always fun to come back to IDWeek, because this is really where we meet old colleagues and friends that we have worked with over the years,” Doi said. “That's the case for many of us. It's also an opportunity to meet new people and even potential new collaborators through, say, poster sessions, also through symposia. There's a lot of new connections that are generated through just conversations.”

Doi says the themes and focus of this year’s event are in a few different areas. “We're really focused on public health, and just given everything that is going on right now, with changes that are occurring in in the public health arena, there's more that we really have to take on ourselves as professionals in the field….There are also other areas, such as AI. Looking at AI, for clinical practice, hospital epidemiology, diagnostics in the laboratory, and even medical education—that's a big theme this year. Another one would be metagenomics. So as these new technologies become more affordable and accessible, more and more hospitals are trying to see how to incorporate use of these new technologies to improve diagnostics and ultimately patient care.”

For events, Doi mentions some of the more popular events happening at the conference.

“We have the bug hub stage and also the global bug hub stage, where people just come up to the stage and talk about their own experiences from here and also other countries around ID, not limited to science, but life in ID in general. We also have the bug crawl; a new feature this year, where the younger generation attendees get to meet people who are well established and people who they otherwise wouldn't get to meet and talk about their lives,” he said.