EU-LIFE community gathers to celebrate 10th anniversary!

This year’s EU-LIFE community meeting was a very special occasion, as it was co-located with an international conference to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the alliance. Both events were held on 5-7 June in Lisbon, Portugal, and hosted by our member institute IGC and the prestigious Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

All attendees received a warm welcome from Mónica Bettencourt-Dias, Chair of EU-LIFE and Director of IGC, followed by parallel meetings of the strategy group and all working groups. The meeting included the session ‘Building the research careers of the future with today’s policies: the European Research Area Action 4’, moderated by Marta Agostinho, EU-LIFE Executive Director. It counted on the valuable contribution of two external speakers: Luísa Henriques, Senior Policy Analyst & Advisor to the Board of Directors at the Portuguese Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, and Simone Lackner, ReMO COST Action Ambassador. During the debate, they were joined by Henri van Luenen, Director of Operations NKI.

The EU-LIFE Conference Envisioning the Research Centres of the Future gave us the opportunity to celebrate the first 10 years of existence and successes of EU-LIFE. The purpose of the event was to provide a space and time to imagine how the places where research takes place shall be in the future to empower scientists, promote ground-breaking discoveries and actively engage with society.

The programme of the conference was organised around four key words: creativity, collaboration, multidisciplinarity and proactivity. Members and leaders of the scientific community from all stages of the research careers, as well as policy makers, joined us to give us their vision and stimulate the debate around the role of these four topics in science. Keynote speakers included Maria Leptin, President of ERC; Stefano Boeri,  Architect & Professor of Urban Planning at Milan Politecnico; Alex Jordan, Group Leader at Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour; and Henrique Leitao, Senior Researcher & Provost of the University of Lisbon.

The programme included a session devoted to the journey of EU-LIFE so far, its role in the European scientific environment and its mission for the future. The poster session was one of the highlights of the conference, with over 40 posters showcasing initiatives that are enhancing research organisations. There was also time to present the awarded essays of the EU-LIFE/Nature Essay Contest: Utopia Institute of Research in a panel with the winning authors and members of the jury. A group of early-career researchers acted as rapporteurs, who were in charge to summarise the main conclusions and their own perspectives at the end of the event.

In the upcoming weeks, we will publish the key points discussed during the conference and the main conclusions reached. Stay tuned!

To watch the recording of the EU-LIFE 10th Anniversary Conference 'Envisioning the Research Centres of the Future', visit our YouTube channel here.