Nathalie Vermeulen, Senior Research Specialist with responsibility for ESHRE guidelines, looks forward to exciting times in the year ahead, with three brand new guidelines and several recommendation papers expected.

ESHRE Chairman Roy Farquharson describes the outcome of a two-year strategic review which aims to enhance member support in five key areas of ESHRE activity.

From almost 3000 candidates applying for certification in embryology, 1266 have so far been successful. Borut Kovačič, chair of the Certification Committee, looks back over the first decade and forward to new standards in the examination process.

The latest SIG Embryology Campus, held in Nice in November, described gamete and embryo assessment as 'The Holy Grail' of embryology. Four young members of the SIG Embryology were among the many participants and they here provide their feedback.

With five ExCo members stepping down after serving two two-year terms, five new members have been selected to replace them. They will take up their posts once ratified at the General Assembly in Vienna.

In his final blog of 2018 ESHRE Chairman Roy Farquharson looks at ESHRE's stakeholder partners in the development of Campus educational courses and in the spread of quality healthcare in reproduction.

Three years after a Swedish group announced live births following uterine transplantation from living donors, a group in Brazil has now reported the world's first live birth with a transplanted uterus retrieved from a deceased donor.

Next year the Norwegian embryologist Arne Sunde will take over as editor-in-chief of ESHRE's remarkably successful review journal Human Reproduction Update, whose impact factor reached 11.85 at the last assessment. Sunde's experience with ESHRE reaches back to the very first Executive Committee assembled by Robert Edwards in 1984.

As ESHRE adopts a greater 'globalised policy', there are now more congress exchange sessions and more stakeholder representation than ever before.

A closed meeting of the European IVF Monitoring (EIM) Consortium, which involved representatives of almost all member nations, outlined the achievements of its data collections as well as the continuing challenges.