As you will have noticed, 2020 has been an unusual year for conferences and speakers! Many events that were scheduled for 2020 will now be happening in 2021 (or even 2022), as you can see in the calendar at the back of the Bulletin, or on the IMS website at https://imstat.org/meetings-calendar/. As a result, several of the special invited IMS lectures are rescheduled to the coming year.

Firstly, at the Seminar on Stochastic Processes (SSP), held at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA, USA, from March 18–20, 2021, there will be two Medallion lectures, from Dmitry Ioffe and Alexei Borodin. See https://wordpress.lehigh.edu/ssp2021/ for more information.

Secondly, at the Bernoulli–IMS 10th World Congress in Probability and Statistics, rescheduled to July 19–23, 2021, in Seoul, South Korea, there will be the IMS lectures that would have been delivered in 2020. These are the Wald lectures from Martin Barlow, the Blackwell lecture from Gábor Lugosi, and five Medallion lectures: Gérard Ben Arous, Andrea Montanari, Elchanan Mossel, Laurent Saloff-Coste, and Daniela Witten. There are two IMS/BS lectures: the Doob lecture, from Nicolas Curien, and the Schramm lecture, by Omer Angel. There will also be the three 2020 Lawrence Brown PhD Student Award winners, giving their talks: Didong Li, Ashwin Pananjady, and Yuqi Gu. (In addition there are five Bernoulli Society named lectures: Persi Diaconis will give the Kolmogorov Lecture, Alison Etheridge the Bernoulli Lecture, Massimilliano Gubinelli the Lévy Lecture, Tony Cai the Laplace Lecture and Sara van der Geer the Tukey Lecture.) Details are forthcoming on the WC website: https://www.wc2020.org/ (same URL as in 2020).

Finally, the Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM), held August 7–12 in Seattle, WA, USA (https://ww2.amstat.org/meetings/jsm/2021/index.cfm), will be the venue for the remaining special invited lectures to be delivered in 2021. The 2021 Wald lecturer is Jennifer Chayes, and the 2021 Le Cam Lecturer is Jianqing Fan. The Medallion lectures will be given by Axel Munk, Robert Nowak, Philippe Rigollet, and Nancy Zhang. The three 2021 Lawrence Brown PhD Student Award winners, announced in the previous issue, are Xin Bing, Ilmun Kim and Yichen Zhang; they will give their papers at a special session. The IMS Presidential Address will be shared between the current President Regina Liu and her predecessor Susan Murphy.

There are two more 2021 Medallion lectures, though both are planned to be delivered in 2022. Hugo Duminil-Copin will give a lecture at the 2022 meeting on Stochastic Processes and their Applications (there is no SPA meeting in 2021), in Wuhan, China, June 27–July 1, 2022. Silvia Serfaty is due to give her Medallion lecture at the 2022 IMS Annual Meeting in London, UK, June 27–30, 2022.

If you are confused by this, be thankful you are not a meeting organizer during a pandemic… and if you are organizing a meeting, thank you!

At the time of writing, all these meetings are planned to be in-person events, but obviously, things may change, so please check the meeting websites nearer the time!