In the middle of 2020, Raili Pall joined the Course and Conference Office (CCO) team. She was the first member to start working with us remotely and it was quite a journey to get everything in place. Despite all this, she was a total hero, learned everything so quickly and started talking the CCO “language” (yeah, we kind of talk in codes for our events) within a few weeks!

Check out her interview to the end, you might want to read her favourite book🙂.

At EMBL since: June 2020
Number of organised conferences/courses: 4

Favourite place in Heidelberg: 
Altstadt (Old Town). I find it really cute, full of nice cafés and restaurants.

First thing you do before a conference/course starts and first thing you do after it finishes:
Before the conference/course starts I’ll go through my checklist to be sure I didn’t forget anything. After a conference/course finishes I say a big thank you to the scientific organisers, speakers and the participants for making it all possible.

What are the challenges/differences of organising a virtual conference or course?
The most challenging is probably the social aspect – working out how to increase the audience interaction and keep them engaged during the virtual event.

What do you miss most about life before the pandemic?
Travelling. I love travelling and discovering new cultures, food and people. I can’t wait to start planning some trips & travel as soon as it’s safe again.

If you weren’t an event organiser, what would you be?
I’d love to be an interior designer. I can spend hours in design shops and reading design & décor magazines. I find it incredible how simple elements can change the look and feel of a space.

If you were a superhero, what power would you like to have?
I would like my superpower to be able to speak all the languages in the world. I find languages fascinating and it would be amazing to be able to communicate with anyone in their language.

Favourite:
Recipe: I love Indian food, so I’d probably choose butter chicken. I recently learned how to cook it myself and am very proud of it😊 .

Book: „On nagu pole“ (“It is like it isn’t”) by Estonian author Alan Adojaan. I read it quite long time ago, but it’s one of the most funny and inspiring travel-books I’ve ever read.

Film: I love to watch movies, so it’s difficult to choose one. I like Paolo Sorrentino (‘La Grande Bellezza’, ‘Youth’, ‘Loro’) and Quentin Tarantino movies. One of the recent highlights was ‘Parasite’ by Bong Joon-ho that I finally managed to watch.