Weekly round-up #52

Weekly round-up #52

The VALIDATE Management Team would like to thank all of our members who attended the 2nd VALIDATE Annual Meeting and our first Early Career Researcher (ECR) Workshop in York from the 5th to the 7th of November - it was lovely to catch up with old members, meet new members in person, and to hear about all of your research!

On the 5th at the workshop our ECR delegates heard talks to inspire them to great leadership, fantastic grant writing, and to take control of their careers - a big thank you to Prof Max Stephenson Jr from Virginia Tech and Dr Martin Broadstock from MRC for speaking. Our ECRs then gained an insight into the career paths of several of VALIDATE's senior members, including a view of how they managed to balance career, research, and family commitments, the choices they made in order to do so and where this led them - thank you to Assoc Prof Narisara Chantratita (Mahidol), Dr Bernardo Villarreal Ramos (APHA), Dr Martin Broadstock (MRC) and Prof Helen Fletcher (LSHTM) for their honest and interesting talks and Q&A answers. Several of our ECRs took the opportunity to get some valuable presentation practice by giving turbo talks on their current research or research plans, and the audience followed suit to ask many pertinent and interesting questions of each speaker (thanks to Dr Rebecca Powell Doherty (Oxford) for the great talk on how to ask questions well beforehand!). We hope that our ECRs came away inspired to be outstanding leaders of the future, and that they will continue to use and develop the skills discussed in this workshop as they move forwards with their careers.

We would particularly like to thank all those who spoke over the three days, expanding members' knowledge and collaborative networks and helping to take a few steps closer to VALIDATE's interdisciplinary goals. This includes Prof Heidi Larson from LSHTM, who gave a very interesting talk about vaccine hesitancy and the issues this poses for vaccine development, as well as VALIDATE members from all of the projects that have received VALIDATE Pump-priming grants so far (find out more about these projects here). It was great to see the three days culminating in the Ideas Laboratory on Wednesday, with many unique and promising ideas formulated through some intense collaboration sessions - we look forward to seeing the fruits of these conversations and discussions in the next Pump-priming grant call!

For those members that attended the workshop and/or Annual Meeting, please do send us your feedback as we want to continue to improve our events to fit our members' needs.

Finally, huge congratulations to VALIDATE Co-Director Helen Fletcher from LSHTM who became a full Professor last week just in time for our meeting. This is a massive achievement - and thoroughly deserved! Congrats Helen; we're delighted for you!!