20 December 2018 – The meeting takes place every two years to offer postdoctoral researchers supported by an EMBO Long-Term Fellowship to build closer connections with the organization and each other.
Eduardo Gonzalez Grandio from the University of Berkeley, California, felt the meeting was useful “both to see what people are doing in other fields of science and to connect with other fellows in the US.” He was only one of four fellows attending the meeting who work on plants, but took away some practical advice from interacting with them. “I connected with two other fellows that are using techniques that I can apply to my project, so it was very useful in that sense,” he said.
Cornell University postdoc Bram van den Bergh also expressed appreciation for the many interesting talks and more importantly “the contacts and experiences shared between the attendants, for which all staying at the same hotel and group dinners and lunches worked extremely well.”
In addition to 41 talks by the fellows, EMBO had invited two former long-term fellows as keynote speakers. Arkaitz Carracedo, Center for Cooperative Research in Biosciences, Bizkaia, Spain and Sabine Petry, Princeton University, USA, presented their science and insights into their scientific career so far.
“I was very happy you invited Arkaitz and Sabine – their talks had a really good balance between great science and useful career advice,” commented Hanneke Vlaming from Harvard University. Johanna Klughammer, from the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, added: “Arkaitz Carracedo’s talk was very helpful, particularly when he talked about his experiences of becoming a PI, including the drop of productivity at the beginning of every new step.”
The next EMBO Fellows’ Meeting will take place in Heidelberg, Germany between 13 and 16 June 2019.
