We'd like to say a huge thank you to all our members who responded to our request for feedback and completed our questionnaire. You've given us lots of interesting and useful information, which we'll be utilising for our strategic planning - and it's great to see that so many members find our website, and these weekly updates, helpful! Do send us any feedback, thoughts or ideas on how we can improve the VALIDATE Network at any time, as we want to continue to be relevant and useful to our Network members and accelerate vaccine development for our focus pathogens.
This week our Co-Director, Associate Professor Helen Fletcher, spoke about VALIDATE at the BactiVac first annual meeting at University of Birmingham, and our Network Manager, Sam Vermaak, represented VALIDATE at a Global Research Funding day to find out about potential grants for our members. We're also looking forward to attending the European Melioidosis Congress on 19-21 March, and the LSHTM World TB Day Symposium on 23 March (which will be live-streamed so do sign up), and hope to chat to many of our members at both events.
And speaking of members, we've had a few more people join our ranks from around the world, so welcome to new Associates Dr Laura Sibley (PHE, UK), Dr Mohamed Osman (University of York, UK), and Dr Tim Inglis (University of Western Australia), and new Affiliates Diego Mpia Elenga (GoResearch CRO, Democratic Republic of The Congo) and Moses Orwe (Kenya Veterinary Vaccines Production Institute). We hope you all find VALIDATE membership fruitful.
Here are a few updates we've posted to our website this week for you:
Funding:
- Newton International Fellowships - for post-docs from Brazil, China, India, Mexico or South Africa to spend 2 years at a UK institute, for clinical or patient-orientated research - 27 Mar 2018
Training/CPD:
Events:
- One Health, Many Perspectives - post-graduate and early career researcher symposium on OneHealth at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, UK (accepting abstracts now) - 29-30 Aug 2018
Jobs:
Very excitingly we've had our first VALIDATE paper this week! Huge congratulations to VALIDATE members Dr Jen Dowd, Assoc Prof Helen Fletcher, and Asst Prof Delia Boccia for their paper "Social determinants and BCG efficacy: a call for a socio-biological approach to TB prevention", which is linked to their VALIDATE-funded pump-priming project (which you can read more about here). F1000 is is accepting submissions in all areas of TB research for their World TB Day collection, so get writing!
On Twitter (@NetworkVALIDATE) this week we've flagged: that ASTHM is accepting abstracts for their annual meeting in October; an opinion piece that 'the leading infectious disease [TB] could be eradicated cheaply'; a Researcher Academy video about conference skills for researchers; that Genedrive has received £1.1mln in funding to finance development of its TB testing kit; and an online article about how vaccines are made.
We'll be having a hiatus on our weekly round-up next week, but will be back on 14th March - in the meantime, if you're an Associate member, don't forget to start pulling together your application for a VALIDATE Fellowship.
Published: 28 February 2018
