ECRO 2025 – The annual conference of the European Chemoreception Research Organization
NOSE was represented by Ilja Croijmans, Monique Smeets, and Sanne Boesveldt at the annual ECRO meeting, in sunny Bilbao, Basque Country, Spain, September 2025.
The conference started with a highly entertaining lecture/show by mixologists from the Guru lab, who explained how they designed and created new flavoured cocktails, including some very interactive videoclips, which resulted in a signature ECRO cocktail shot to taste for everyone!
Ilja and Monique contributed to various posters that were presented during the poster sessions at ECRO. Ilja co-authored a poster with NOSE member Jasper de Groot and Sebastian Sadowski, on how pleasant smells can improve donating money to charities, but that this effect did not interact with the linguistic pronouns used in the charitable appeals. This study is now published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology.
Monique and Ilja were also involved in a poster on the ability to name foul (disgust inducing) versus fragrant (generally pleasant) odors (guess what: the former are easier to name than the latter…) presented by research master student Bea van den Berg (see the picture below); and in a poster on how concern about your own underarm sweating and odour can affect your social and emotional wellbeing, which was presented by Monique.
At the final day of the conference, Sanne chaired a symposium on ‘Sensory alterations in patients with cancer: from fundamental insights to clinical solutions’. Within this symposium, Sanne presented the TASTY project, a clinical trial led by University Medical Center Groningen, aimed to improve food enjoyment and prevent malnutrition in cancer patients through taste steering and taste and smell training interventions. Moreover, a symposium on ‘Chemosensory loss in long Covid’ featured one of Sanne’s PhD students, Birgit van Dijk, who presented results from the COVORTS study, on structural brain alterations in patients suffering from COVID-19-related smell dysfunction. (Text continues below pictures)
Furthermore, there was a wonderfully inspiring keynote lecture by Cecilia Bembibre, deputy director Sustainable Heritage at University College London, who talked about smells as cultural records, and described the process of understanding what olfactory heritage is, how to collect and/or recreate such smells, and even brought some for the audience to try! I will not easily forget the past smell of a dead mummy from ancient Egypt: ‘decay, age and looming spirits, but also flowers and funerals’!
ECRO is a inspiring conference for meeting new people and reconnecting with old friends. Lively scientific discussions were had over the tapas lunches, during Basque Txakoli wine tasting, on the boat tour on the Nervión river and at the gala dinner (including a dance party, of course). Many new insights and ideas were gathered to be implemented in further writing/studies. All abstracts from the conference will be published in the journal Chemical Senses, so keep your eyes peeled if you’re interested!