In April the Frontiers in CardioVascular Biology meeting was held in the beautiful city of Vienna. Professor Johann Wojta and his team did an excellent job in hosting the 5th edition of this biannual conference.
SoT Nucleus with Johan Wojta
This year, the FCVB offered many great opportunities for young scientists. Prof. Wojta gave his perspectives on this subject in the Cardiovascular Research OnLife video interview. Besides the interactive poster sessions, there were two excellent and well attended young investigator award sessions.
Our aim as SoT is to represent and to interact with the young scientific community. At the FCVB we had the privilege of contributing to the meeting in several ways. This included an early career session where several subjects were covered that are important for developing a career in science including establishing your own lab, grant writing, the challenges and opportunities faced by women in science, and the importance of young scientific communities. Additionally, within the “How to Publish your Cardiovascular Research” session Kostas Stellos introduced the online platform: Cardiovascular Research Onlife.
Image from left to right: The SoT working behind the scenes: Anke Smits, Jyoti Patel, Kostas Stellos, Constanze Schmidt, Albano Meli and Niels Voigt.
A great achievement this year was the incorporation of a genome editing boot-camp in collaboration with the AHA Council on Genomic and Precision Medicine. Prof Musunuru gave an excellent overview of the current state of affairs, while nicely highlighting the challenges ahead for the relatively novel technique of genome editing. The interactive CRISPR boot-camp provided attendees with the possibility to develop some basic editing skills.
ESC SoT Twitter
For the first time the SoT turned to Twitter to disseminate information using #ESCSoT. Jyoti Patel (@DrJyoti_Patel) and Anke Smits (@AnkeMSmits) were asked to serve as official Twitter ambassadors for the FCVB and provided real-time coverage of the meeting through their own channels, as well as via @escardio. The SoT are planning to use this medium more often, so keep an eye out for #ESCSoT in the future, especially during the upcoming ESC congress.
Networking event
Another first this FCVB was a dedicated networking event for ‘young’ scientists. A very nice bar in downtown Vienna provided an excellent setting to meet peers and discuss work and career perspectives. For us, it provided a great setting to investigate how we can represent the young basic science community. Several great ideas were mentioned and we will definitely take these along in our future endeavours.
If you were unable to attend, but do have ideas you would like to share, please do not hesitate to contact us through email, LinkedIn or Twitter.
Our mission: To reduce the burden of cardiovascular disease.