Dear colleagues,
We hope you have had a fantastic summer and if you’re still on holidays, we envy you! We are ready to go back to work again! In today's newsletter, we will share with you the highlights of the annual SFRR-E Meeting in Istanbul.
Highlights of the Events organized by the ECR Subcommittee at the SFRR-E Meeting in Istanbul:
The last annual meeting of the SFFR-E took place in Istanbul, 5-7 June 2024 and we organized multiple exciting events dedicated to ECRs (and not only)!
1) ECR networking event (Wednesday 5th June at 18:30, Hall 2).
On the first evening of the conference we enjoyed our yearly ECR networking event. We started by making teams based on our famous stickers that you love so much! After a brief introduction of yourselves to break the ice, we continued by playing in teams a challenging puzzle game in which only the best teams got to go ahead to the next rounds. At the end, the remaining team was proclaimed the winners and got the prize.
It was hilarious seeing all of you discussing the solutions for the different puzzles and chasing our juries to advance to the next round! We hope you all had a lot of fun together and enjoyed making new connections.
2) Meet-the-Professors session (Wednesday 5th June, at 19:30, Hall 2).
On Wednesday evening, after the ECR networking event, we had the “Meet the Professors” session, open to everybody.
We welcomed 9 professors and group leaders with diverse areas of expertise: Daniela Caporossi, Niki Chondrogianni, Andreas Daiber, Mike Davies, Isabel Fabregat, Clare Hawkins, Malcolm Jackson, João Laranjinha, Giuseppe Valacchi and David Heppner.
We started with a brief introduction of the careers of our guests to get to know all of them and, afterwards, teams were formed including one of our special guests per team! We gave each team pasta and marshmallows and the hard task of building a tower. The team who built the highest tower with our fancy construction materials would be the winner!!
It was very funny seeing all of you teaming up together and even laying on the ground very concentrated on building the tower. It was impressive how some of the teams applied the most innovative building techniques!!
3) Sunrise Round Table I: Pillow Talks: From Academia to Industry (Thursday 6th June at 8:00, Hall 2).
On Thursday we began the morning with a sunrise round table, open for early birds and everybody who was not tired after a networking night.
Experts from academia (Antonio Cuadrado, Giuseppe Valacchi and Kasia Whysall) and industry (Mike Lu, Sven Terclavers and Carmen Veith) were there to discuss diverse career paths. Thank you all for the participation!
Everybody asked their questions about how it is working in either one of these sectors and it was very interesting knowing the pros and cons of each side. It is clear that career perspectives is a very important topic for ECRs and that many of you are very interested about this topic when you are at the end of your PhDs or while during your postdocs. For this reason we are planning on organising more events like that for ECRs!
4) Sunrise Round Table II: ROS Measurement: From Bedside to Bench (Friday 7th June at 8:00, Hall 2).
On Friday morning, we prepared a sunrise round table, open for everybody, focused on how to measure ROS. We were happy that many people joined, ECRs and not, considering also the early hour!
For this event we were honoured to have experts in ROS measurements (Michael Davies, Clare Hawkins, Giovanni Mann, Jan Riemer and Hadley D. Sikes). Our chairs (Veronica Lisi and Timoteo Marchini) organised a novel fishbowl set up which greatly helped to keep the dynamic of the event.
We were happy to see that how to measure ROS in an accurate way was such an important topic for you all, senior and not, and the very interesting debates originated during the round table.
5) ECR-Symposium: H2O2 on the Move: from Sub-cellular Redox Signals to Therapeutic Potential (Friday 7th June at 9:00, Hall 1).
On Friday morning, after the sunrise round table, we had our first symposium within the SFRR-E Annual Meeting organized only by ECRs. The symposium was chaired by Cristina Mas-Bargues and Carmen Veith. David Heppner, Rut Espinosa, Carlos Henriquez Olguin and Carmen Veith discussed a lot about NADPH oxidases in different contexts and diseases as well as subcellular hydrogen peroxide compartmentalization.
It was great seeing so many people at the symposium, interested in the work of our invited speakers. We deeply believe that it is inspirational for ECRs seeing the work of their peers at similar stages of their careers.
We also got to acknowledge the young researchers that presented great science at the meeting. The SFRR-E gave 6 awards to Irene Canovas-Cervera (Spain), Javier Marques (Spain), Ufuk Ersoy (UK), Attila Altinpinar (UK), Lea Strohm (Germany) and Konstantinos Papanikolaou (Greece). Congratulations to all the awardees!!
We had an incredible time together during the SFRR-E conference and it was very motivating seeing so many people enjoying our events and helping us build an ever growing community of young redox researchers!
The ECR subcommittee says a big THANKS! to everybody who attended our events, see you next year in Galway between 3 - 6 June 2025! You can already find details about the 2025 meeting in https://www.sfrrgalway2025.com.
More information about the ECR Subcommittee can be found on the SFRR-E website (ECR Committee (sfrr-europe.org), while regular updates can be found on Twitter (@SFRR_Europe), Instagram (@sfrr_ecr) and LinkedIn (SFRR-E). For any question or suggestion you might have, you can contact us via email:
Stay tuned for the next newsletter, it will be full with new information for ECRs!
The ECR subcommittee