EU-LIFE blog: My first EU-LIFE Community Meeting
By Laura Ward, Senior Project Manager at GIMM and member of the EU-LIFE Gender Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Working Group.
From 21 to 23 May, 7 “GIMMers” from the Gulbenkian Institute for Molecular Medicine (GIMM) headed to Brno, Czech Republic to take part in the 12th EU-LIFE Community Meeting, this year expertly hosted by CEITEC - Central European Institute of Technology. For the majority of our team, it was our very first EU-LIFE meeting - and what a welcome it was!
In an insightful state-of-play update, EU-LIFE Executive Director Marta Agostinho kicked off the event by recounting EU-LIFE’s successes and challenges over the past year and emphasizing the critical role of the alliance in an increasingly unpredictable scientific and sociopolitical climate. This was followed by some crowd warm-ups from Giulio Superti-Furga (CeMM) and Pavels Tomančák and Plevka (CEITEC), ensuring even the newbies could recognize the key faces and setting an optimistic tone for the activities to come.
We then settled into our Working Groups (WG) for the remainder of the meeting. With several new members of the Gender Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (GEDI) WG present, we spent some time on the first day getting to know each other and our respective institutes’ approaches to inclusion beyond gender, voted as the WG priority topic for 2025. I quickly understood that whilst GIMM excels in some GEDI respects – gender balance in decision-making positions, support for LGBT awareness and facilitation of internationalization – we also have a long way to go to ensure we meet the GEDI needs of our community and to diversify to conduct the best science. And this is where our EU-LIFE colleagues come in! We were all very excited to hear about the recent VIB Impact Study and how we might apply a similar methodology, using “business KPIs” for measuring and communicating EDI successes and costs resulting from a lack or loss of diversity.
On day 2, our WG conducted a Gender Equality Plan (GEP) review exercise, mimicking a pilot recently been conducted by the European Commission, to ensure we all remain eligible for funding in the current and next framework programmes – the strengthening of monitoring mechanisms being a key take-home message. We then discussed how to frame the evaluation process of the first Pathfinder Mentorship Programme for Postdoctoral Women, hoping to be able to integrate this feedback into an updated version of the programme, to be launched this autumn (TBC).
On the last day of the meeting, the GEDI WG joined forces with the Science Communication WG to participate in an Inclusive Communications Workshop with Robin Craig from the Wellcome Trust. This was a great opportunity to discuss existing practices and understand context-dependent and common challenges. A practical mixed-group exercise on Disability-inclusive Communications and Events was particularly enlightening, giving us the prompts and space to proactively consider changes we can already put in place in our institutes to maximize engagement. This new approach of bringing together two WG for transversal themes, I believe, was particularly successful.
On a personal level, the meeting was also a key internal community building moment with the GIMM colleagues present – on both nights we stayed up in the hotel lobby digesting all that we had learned that day and planning how to apply it back in Portugal. The enthusiasm was infectious, and we headed home with bags full of benchmarks, best practices and new contacts. I am very much looking forward to working with the "GEDIs" and the wider alliance, and hope to see some EU-LIFE members here in Lisbon for our inaugural GIMM Festival later this year! Děkuju e Até breve!
