Jennifer Van Eyk, Burcu Ayoglu, Ferdinando Cerciello, Justyna Fert-Bober, Ruth Hüttenhain, Mathieu Lavallée-Adam, Adriana Franco Paes Leme, Giuseppe Palmisano, Ilaria Piazza, Fábio César Sousa Nogueira)
The ECR was launched as a new HUPO initiative at HUPO 2015 World Congress in Vancouver. The intent of the ECR is to be an open and easily reachable platform dedicated to the new generation of proteomics scientists of the HUPO community.
The ECR aims are to (1) promote connection between generations of proteomics scientists along the visions and the ideals of HUPO; (2) promote the scientific work of the new generation of proteomics scientists and to provide training and support for their early career development; (3) promote interaction and international collaboration among early career investigators in proteomics.
To achieve these aims, we explored common facilitators and challenges faced by early career researchers in proteomics during annual Mentoring Day at HUPO world congresses. The program of Mentoring Day, every year is different and has several ingredients to enhance an ECR individual’s success. Having supportive collegial relationships, institutional support, job security, and funding are critical facilitators for early career investigators. Key challenges include difficulty with time management and prioritizing, limited resources, and contacts. The talks, conversations and friendly atmosphere during Mentoring day, can potentially help transfer knowledge and expertise since it represents a variety of professional backgrounds and experience from more mature generation. This is also an exceptional opportunity to approach and interact with current and future world-renowned leaders in proteomics! For example, the focus of the mentoring day at HUPO2018 in Orlando was on “communication” and the program included various topics such as “what qualities are necessary for successful communication?”, “ten simple rules for choosing between industry and academia”, “communicating with funding agencies”, etc. Our mentors in Orlando were Beth Anderson (Arkitek Scientific), Nicolai Bache (Evosep), Sixue Chen (University of Florida, USA), Benjamin Garcia (University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, USA), Arianna Jones (Sciex), Kathryn Lilley (Cambridge Centre for Proteomics. University of Cambridge. UK), Stephen R. Pennington (UCD Conway Institute, Dublin), Robert Rivers (NIH, USA), Jennifer Van Eyk (Cedars Sinai Medical Center).
ECR also promotes the scientific work of the new generation by organizing manuscript competition. For the manuscript competition, early career researchers are invited to submit their scientific work in form of a manuscript, which has either been published or accepted for publication within the previous year. Three finalists are then invited to present their research at the HUPO world congress to select the proteomic highlight of the year. For our most recent manuscript competition at HUPO2018 in Orlando we had three winners, Dr. Ruth Hüttenhain (University of California, San Francisco, USA), Dr. Mathieu Lavallée-Adam (University of Ottawa, Canada) and Dr. Ilaria Piazza (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology-ETH Zurich, Switzerland)! (pictures of the winners are reported below)
In addition to the already established activities, the ECR proudly contributed to the success of the HUPO PhD poster competition at HUPO2018 in Orlando. While the poster competition is an already established and successful tradition of HUPO, ECR started to be involved in organizing the competition as a way to highlight the work of very early career scientists! Eight finalists of the competition were selected to present their work in a three-minute power point presentation and Desmond Li (University of Sydney), Aaron Robinson (Cedars Sinai Medical Center) and Amber Weiner (University of Pennsylvania) were the winners of last year’s final! (pictures of the finalists are reported below, but CAVE: they have already been presented in a previous HUPOST)
HUPO2018 in Orlando was not only important for the ECR for expanding their activities but also for kicking off a bigger working committee. In 2015 ECR was successfully established by Dr. Burcu Ayoglu (KTH Royal Institute of Technology), Dr. Ferdinando Cerciello (University Hospital of Bern) and Dr. Justyna Fert-Bober (Cedars Sinai Medical Center) under the mentoring of Prof. Jennifer Van Eyk (Cedars Sinai Medical Center). To expand ECR activities they are now joined by the three finalists of the 2018 ECR manuscript competition (Dr. Ruth Hüttenhain, Dr. Mathieu Lavallée-Adam and Dr. Ilaria Piazza) as well as Dr. Giuseppe Palmisano (University of San Paolo, Brazil), Dr. Fábio César Sousa Nogueira (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) and Dr. Adriana Franco Paes Leme (Brazilian Biosciences National Laboratory, Brazil).
And our new members are already at hard work! Indeed, we are working on identifying new and additional opportunities to support and promote the scientific work of early career scientists, ideally in form of collaborative grants between young scientists. We are also working on defining a curriculum of “must to know” for early career scientists in proteomics. We hope that we will be able to join forces with already experienced education initiatives within HUPO and other groups of young researchers in proteomics in order to be able to establish together a series of master classes in proteomics dedicated to the early career researchers. In addition, we are reaching out to regional early career proteomics communities across the globe to connect and join forces with the intention to identify needs of early career researchers in proteomics, to further expand ECR activities and to support building up new regional communities for early career researchers!
Finally, a motivation for all early career researchers in proteomics to get ready for HUPO2019 in Adelaide:
And finally, a warm thank you for reading about our progresses!
The ECR working committee
The winners of the ECR manuscript competition at HUPO2018 in Orlando (from left to right): Dr. Ruth Hüttenhain (University of California, San Franciso, USA), Dr. Mathieu Lavallée-Adam (University of Ottawa, Canada), Dr. Ilaria Piazza (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology-ETH Zürich, Switzerland).
The finalists of the PhD poster competition: Shubham Gupta (Canada), Andreas Hober (Sweden), Desmond Li (Australia), Benjamin Pullman (USA), Aaron Robinson (USA), Tim Van Den Bossche (Belgium), Amber Weiner (USA), Juanjuan Xie (China).
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