Apologies for the belated round-up this week due to the British public holiday yesterday - for once, with sunshine! The two coincide as rarely as the occurrence of a blue moon so we were all out in the sun, making the most of it. Today of course we are back to the more usual British 'summer' of cloud and scattered showers... those visiting Oxford next week from overseas, you have been warned!
This week has seen a nice growth spurt to the VALIDATE Network, with new Associate members galore. We've been joined by Dr Ian Durrant, Director of Scientific Operations at one of our industry partners, Oxford Immunotec Ltd; Dr Edessa Negera Gobena from LSHTM/AHRI Ethiopia, a post-doc studying leprosy and TB; Dr Rachel Tanner a TB post-doc at University of Oxford, Dr Makhtar Camara a TB post-doc in Senegal, and Dr Barbara Kronsteiner-Dobramysl a melioidosis post-doc at University of Oxford. Helping Early Career Researchers in their career trajectories to independence is a key aim of VALIDATE, so it is great to see so many post-docs joining our ranks. Please do encourage any in your research group to join us - membership gives Associates access to our mentoring scheme, training grants, workshops and other events and continuing professional development opportunities.
In addition to our new Associates, we have a new Network Investigator, with Prof Richard White from LSHTM bringing his infectious disease modelling expertise to the Network. Welcome to all our new members; we hope you'll find VALIDATE useful and informative - and do get in touch with us with any ideas you have for how we can improve.
There have been a couple of relevant new grant calls:
- MRC: Joint Global Health Trials Scheme, Sept 2017
- Sir Henry Dale Fellowships, Nov 2017
Find more details about these on our external funding page to see if they'll suit you.
As always, we've been keeping you informed on Twitter (@NetworkValidate), with tips from Nature on how an individual development plan can help advance your research career, articles spotted on how increasing memory CD8+ T cells through activation of the proteasome could be used as an adjuvant to improve vaccines and how leprosy turns the immune system against itself, and advice from the MRC on how to improve your research reproducibility - all good reads, so do follow us!
With our first annual meeting just a week away, we look forward to meeting many of you in Oxford next week for a lively and interesting kick-off to the VALIDATE Network and our plans to accelerate vaccine development and our members' research careers. See you there!
Published: 29 August 2017
