MESI-STRAT Annual Meeting, April 2020
MESI-STRAT Annual Meeting
All of us were looking forward to our Annual Meeting. Personal meetings increase interaction and exchange and offer a great opportunity especially for PostDocs, PhD students, and technicians to see how their results are used and developed by other partners. Therefore, we were quite unhappy that we had to cancel our on-site event due to the restrictions introduced to stop the COVID-19 outbreak. Health and safety always come first.
We tried to make the best out of it and adapted our original program to an online meeting. Although we are used to video chats, a virtual meeting with almost 50 participants was new for most of us and required several rounds of testing and organization beforehand. It was worth the effort, we had a productive meeting and managed to define our goals and a clear strategy to achieve the deliverables and milestones of the upcoming year. In the end, all participants agreed they enjoyed talking science despite the circumstances. Still, we hope that personal meetings will soon be possible again and we will be able to gather on-site in Innsbruck next year.
We would like to thank Dr. Julia Waldschmidt from the University Hospital of Freiburg who joined our meeting as a Clinical Opinion Leader. A big thank you goes to the members of our International Advisory Board: Dr. Anne-Lise Børresen-Dale (Norwegian Radium Hospital in Oslo), Dr. Pernette Verschure (University of Amsterdam), Dr. Gerburg Wulf, MD, PhD (Dana-Farber Harvard Cancer Center, Boston, USA) and Dr. Andreas Raue (HiFiBio Therapeutics, Cambridge, USA) for their input and advice. Dr. Laia Quirós Pesudo, our project officer from the European Commission, also joined our meeting. We are very grateful for that and want to thank her for her kind help and continuous support, especially in these turbulent times.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 754688.