EU-LIFE May 2014 Events: Scientific and Community Meetings

From May 12th to 15th 2014, at the CRG, in Barcelona, two main EU-LIFE events were held: The first EU-LIFE Scientific Workshop on Biology of Cancer, and the second EU-LIFE Community Meeting.

The first EU-LIFE scientific workshop brought together basic scientists and clinicians from EU-LIFE institutes (and collaborators) to explore and discuss new directions in cancer biology by integrating clinical needs, new discoveries in cancer biology, omics technologies, drug discovery pipelines, and latest computational and modeling approaches. The workshop provided an opportunity to forge new scientific collaborations within EU-LIFE and found the basis for future joint activities and projects.

Format              

• Each EU-LIFE institute invited a “tandem of speakers”, one being a basic researcher and the second a clinical researcher, who are engaged in a cooperative projec, or whose work is relevant to each other.
• Each tandem of speaker had a one hour slot to present their work jointly and highlight opportunities and challenges of their collaboration. Within the one-hour slot, enough time was left for lively discussion.
• The meeting also included a poster session for junior researchers. Each EU-LIFE institute invited one or two students (PhDs or postdocs) to present their projects as poster (joint posters are also possible).

During our 2nd Community Meeting, 85 EU-LIFE members presented main results of the 7 Working groups we have established, focusing on Grants, Science Communication, Translational Research, Technology Transfer, Training, IT and Indicators of Excellence. In addition to sharing best practice and benefiting from each other’s expertise and experience in all these domains, we have initiated several joint actions which were presented during the meeting.

We were honoured by the presence of two distinguished guests: 

• Alessandra Luchetti, European Commission, Head of Unit, Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions, who presented her vision of how an alliance such as EU-LIFE could be an interesting partner for the European Commission.
• Iain Mattaj, Director of EMBL, who as our scientific advisor gave us thourough feedback on the organisation and achievements of our alliance