Newsletter - January 2016

Instruct monthly brief – January 2016

Callum Smith (IT Officer) and Claudia Alen Amaro (Instruct Project Manager) represented Instruct at the WestLife Kick-off Meeting at STFC Cosener’s House in Oxfordshire on the 27-28th January. West-life is an initiative to develop a Virtual Research Environment (VRE) in the e-Infrastructure programme (EINFRA-9-2015). Lucia Banci (Instruct-IT) presented an Instruct update at the meeting.

Dave Stuart (Instruct Director), Susan Daenke (Instruct Hub Coordinator) and Claudia Alen Amaro (Instruct Project Manager) represented Instruct at the Instruct Council Meeting that took place on the 18th of January at the MRC central offices in London. The Council welcomed Stine vad Bovtrup to her first Council meeting as representative of Denmark.

The UK host delegate for Instruct (UK Ministry for Business, Innovation and Skills) received the Instruct-ERIC submission for Step 1 of the ERIC application on 28th of January from the MRC.

The Instruct Executive Committee, the principal executive management committee for Instruct, met on the 22nd of January by videoconference.

Alberto Podjarny from Instruct FR1 represented Instruct at the First Medical Infrastructures/Users Forum (MIUF) meeting in Paris the 25-26 January 2016. He reported back to the Hub and will provide a summary of key points arising from the meeting.

Representatives of all Instruct Centres had a teleconference in preparation for the Instruct application to H2020-INFRADEV3-2016-2017.

Susan Daenke coordinated a videoconference to advance the interface of CORBEL with the project AARC (led by Geant) and negotiate a role in the proposed AARC2 application in preparation. It was agreed in principle that Instruct and Infrafrontier (co-leads in CORBEL WP5) would be beneficiary partners, along with Elixir, in the application. AARC provide federated AAI solutions using the EduGain framework and will work on a solution for a single point of access to all BMS RIs.

Dave Stuart, Susan Daenke and Claudia Alen Amaro worked on the organisation of the British Council funded workshop ‘Integrative methods in Structural Biology to enhance high impact research in health and disease’ to take place in Montevideo in February 2016.

Alberto Podjarny (Instruct FR1) and Maria Armenia Carrondo (Instruct PT) lead the work on establishing Instruct participation on WP2016-2017: InfraSupp-01-2016 Policy and international cooperation measures for research infrastructures Support the training needs of the Synchrotron light for Experimental Science and Applications (SESAME) facility located in Jordan and the staff exchange with other European light source infrastructures to ensure its optimal use by the research community for world class research

Lorraine Gough (Finance Officer, Instruct Hub) represented Instruct at the OnCourse meeting in Brussels as part of the IMI project EMTRAIN.

Ondrej Hradil (Instruct-CZ), Lucia Banci (Instruct-IT), Jose Maria Carazo (Instruct-ES) and Susan Daenke continued their work within the Instruct Business group with a meeting in London and a teleconference.

Upcoming events:

Teleconference of the Instruct Biennial Structural Biology Meeting 2017 Scientific Organising Committee (March 2016 tbc)

3 to 5th of February 2016 BioStruct-X Final Meeting.

Continue work on Horizon 2020 applications with deadline March 2016

Instruct has been involved in organising a joint scientific workshop to establish formal collaborations between the UK and Uruguay structural biology communities. The initiative is aimed at securing long term relationships with Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina as specified in an MOU to be signed at the end of the workshop. The workshop is fully funded by the British Council and Instruct is leading the UK involvement. The workshops will be held in Montevideo on 16-19th February jointly with the Institut Pasteur (Montevideo). Applications for early stage researchers to attend are now open, but are open only to those resident in either the UK or Uruguay.

More about these and other news at instruct-eric.eu or everyday on Twitter @Instructhub