An interview with Dr Eric Liou
Vice President APOS
APOS Orator for 9th IOC
The 9th International Orthodontic Congress (IOC) in conjunction with the 12th Asian Pacific Orthodontic Conference (APOC) and the 79th Annual Meeting of the Japanese Orthodontic Society (JOS) will be held on the 4th to 6th October 2020. Dr Eric Liou, the Vice President of the APOS will be delivering the 2020 APOS Oration and we have asked him to share some of his thoughts on this very important occasion:
The 2020 APOS Oration will be held on a virtual platform for the first time. How do you feel about this?
There are two firsts for me: this will be my first presentation as an APOS Orator and the second ‘first’ is that this will be the first ever APOC and IOC held on a virtual platform. The Covid-19 pandemic has changed our lives in the most dramatic way and a virtual meeting could be a new routine for the years to come.
Bearing this in mind, I have had to change my preparation and presentation style to suit the ‘new norm’. There are normally two ways to give a presentation for a virtual meeting. The first method is to give the lecture in real time and the second is to pre-record the presentation. Webinars that are pre-recorded will mean that all my slides must be finalised much earlier than the actual virtual meeting. This is quite different from a physical presentation when I was still able to redo and change my presentation slides even until the last minutes before the lecture. For this APOS Oration, I will prefer a real time virtual lecture so that I can have more time to prepare and finalise my lecture notes.
What can the participants expect from the 2020 APOS Oration?
I will be talking about ‘Redirecting mandibular and maxillary growth in pubertal growing patients with Class III malocclusion’. I will be discussing topics such as how the maxilla could be grown simply by using open coil springs. I will also be talking about maxillary and mandibular total arch extrusion and at the same time, how the mandible can be re-directed to grow backward and downward.
The presentation will be on given on the 5th October 2020 and it will be a 40minutes lecture. Please do refer to the 9th IOC 2020 Website for the abstract of my oration.
We are indeed very grateful for a world renown speaker like yourself to deliver our 2020 APOS Oration. How do you feel about this memorable moment?
It has been such an honour to be nominated to give this oration. I do not consider myself a world renown speaker and I know many more speakers, researchers and clinicians who are better than me in the Asia Pacific region. Indeed, I was very surprised when my nomination was approved at the APOS Annual General Meeting to deliver the 2020 APOS Oration.
As an orthodontist, I have been enthusiastically challenging myself in developing new ideas and innovative treatment techniques for solving different kinds of clinical dilemma. These include rapid canine retraction, interdental distraction osteogenesis for approximating a wide alveolar cleft before alveolar bone grafting, the application of platelet rich plasma for accelerating orthodontic tooth movement and preserving the alveolar bone, to name a few.
One of the most recent concepts that I have been working on is the control of maxillary and mandibular growth in Class III growing patients. I will continue to grow and find new ways to improve orthodontic clinical practice and I am grateful to the APOS for recognizing the achievements my team and I have done thus far.
The 12th APOC will be held in unusual and unprecedented circumstances, do you think it will be just as fulfilling and memorable?
This will be the first virtual meeting in the history of APOC and in all honesty, no one will know whether it will be as successful as a physical meeting. However, I can see some advantages in a virtual concept, for example: the number of participants who are available to join a virtual meeting should (hopefully) be more than a physical meeting since we are able to reduce travelling time and expenses. I also see the convenience of joining a virtual meeting from a computer or smartphone at any time and from any parts of the world. After all, be it a virtual or a physical meeting, I believe that it is the people and the family of APOS that makes the Congress a success year in and year out!
