EPN monthly lunch meetings

Invitation to present your lab at the European Psychoneuroimmunology Network (EPN,https://pnieurope.eu/) monthly Tuesday lunch meetings “Current content on EPN research – Neurokolloquium”, which will be held between 12:15 and 13:45 every first Tuesday in a month.

Meetings are held as Webex online-seminars; Link: https://uni-giessen.webex.com/uni-giessen/j.php?MTID=m6d3f9117c4948961cb8c0bdd5028602b

• The aim of the series is to foster PI, student and postdoc exchanges between labs, grant funding and European Training Network funding by the EU
• Foster regular interactions
• Invite potential interested labs to get involved in the network and introduce the labs to one another
• Formalize and structure EPN doctoral training
• For this purpose, all PIs should try to get local accreditation from their relevant Graduate Schools. This will limit the efforts to install a regular training in the field of PNI as part of the normal educational programs.
• We can then advertise a joined seminar series with the involvement of several European Universities/Graduate Schools. This will not necessitate to much formal effort but will increase visibility, and may serve as an established base for funding.
• The lunch meetings will include:
  • PIs presenting their lab in a 20 minutes talk; potentially involving an additional labs interested to get involved in the network
  • Semi-structured networking tasks for doctoral students in PNI researchers in Europe at the end of each lecture session, guided by a mentor
  • Continuous discussion between PIs

Framework (90 minutes): We make a plan and suggest that every month a lab presents their research (topics, methods and current findings) in a 20 minutes presentation (to limit the extra efforts so everyone can handle it) with 25 minutes time for discussion. The presenting lab can also invite another collaborating lab with the interest to reach out and strengthen our network (than 2 x 15 minutes presentations). After 5 minutes break, the networking part starts for doctoral students with breakout sessions or Gather Town (3-4 x 10 minutes in changing groups with maximal 2-4 students) and time for discussion on specific topics (career, writing thesis, methods swabs, presentation skills, animal to human translations, clinical trials, omics etc.) with one PI being the moderator. At the same time, there is another breakout room reserved for discussions between PIs about funding or organizational topics. To ensure smooth running of the series we need a core team of PIs (currently: Christoph Rummel, Bianka Karshikoff), postdocs, and students that agree to host the monthly meetings according to availability. These hosts just care for the overall structure, inform the network, and foster the networking between doctoral students. The presenting lab is responsible for the content and specific focus. Labs are asked to sign in according to availability.