Science and policy: EU-LIFE Community met in Amsterdam

ERC President, Jean-Pierre Bourguignon was the key note speaker at the 2016 EU-LIFE Community Meeting, which was held 2-3 November at The Netherlands Cancer Institute (NKI) in Amsterdam. The President of the European Research Council joined EU-LIFE community to discuss the challenging perspectives of research in Europe including the next framework programme (FP9) and overall science policy. With the ongoing interim evaluation of H2020, the upcoming FP9 and the 10th Anniversary of ERC, we will have several opportunities in 2017 to voice our views on how Research & Innovation can best contribute to our society.

The EU-LIFE Community meeting gathers - on an annual basis - those in EU-LIFE institutes who build the alliance together and strive to hand over its added value to researchers. This year as usual, 8 working groups met to finalise the action plan for 2017, share expertise, and network.

An agreement on the launching of a Visiting programme for EU-LIFE scientists was reached and “Learning from each other” topics included a talk on tech transfer (presented by EU-LIFE partner VIB, Belgium) and another on Training programmes for development (presented by EU-LIFE partner IGC, Portugal).

We now look forward towards 2017!