Speaker Bios

Scientific Programme Committee

Arkaitz Carracedo and Elisa Oricchio, EACR Representatives for Early Career Researchers

Full list of speakers and links available here

"Find your career path, don't search for it": Career-building tips and strategies from an inveterate career-changer

Chapin Rodríguez, Creaducate Consulting, Germany

It's nothing new: already a decade ago, analyses by the Royal Society in the UK and the National Science Foundation in the US showed that most PhD researchers do not remain in academia but go off into other domains to seek their fortunes. This can seem disappointing to those who would prefer to remain in the laboratory, and it can seem frightening to those who have never given a thought to working away from the bench. This presentation will try to give you perspective on the strange beast that is academic research, encourage you to feel excited and emboldened by the growing array of careers that welcome former researchers, and provide suggestions and experiences about how to navigate (y)our uncertain future.

Speaker Information

Chapin trained as a chemist and biochemist at Duke University (US), as a molecular and cell biologist at UT Southwestern Medical Center (US) and the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (UK), and as a molecular neuroscientist at Harvard Institutes of Medicine and Brigham and Women's Hospital (US). Since leaving the bench, he spent many years searching for professional meaning, working as a European Affairs Manager at a large scientific society, a teacher of biology and chemistry at the secondary and university levels, and a program assistant at a non-governmental organization. For more than a decade, he has found a home in the world of scientific communication, founding thriving consultancies in Hong Kong and Germany (www.creaducate.eu). But if you ask him what he wants to be when he grows up, he'll still claim he doesn't know. 

“Resilience”

Samuel Krahl, EMBO, Germany

Scientists face significant pressure in their careers that can lead to negative impacts on their emotional and physical health and well-being. Resilience is the ability to cope with these emotional and physical impacts of adverse circumstances by cultivating long-term strengths, good relationships, good communication skills and an awareness of and ability to manage emotions.  In this session, we will discuss why resilience is important for mental health and well-being, the things that are important to support us in being resilient, and that resilience is a long-term process that enables us to build the capacity to thrive. We will then offer participants a 3-step tool for giving feedback to the people they work with, helping them to communicate assertively and deal with behaviour or situations that have a negative impact on them.

Learning outcomes: what resilience is and how it is cultivated; a 3-step feedback model for dealing with difficult situations and behaviour.

Speaker Information

Sam completed his PhD at the University of East Anglia, UK, characterising the genes and molecules involved in the inositol hexakisphosphate production pathway in Solanum tuberosum. He worked as an editor for EMBO Reports, editing the Science & Society section of the journal for 9 years, and as Publishing Manager for all five EMBO Press journals for 2 years before joining the EMBO Solutions training team in 2017, with responsibility for the EMBO Laboratory Leadership training.

EACR-NCRI Joint Panel Discussion “Meet the Funders” – What matters to them and how to best engage them in your research

Chair: Ian Lewis, Head of Strategy and Initiatives, NCRI

Panel members

• Geraldine Byrne, Breast Cancer Now, UK
• Lynn Turner, Worldwide Cancer Research, UK
• Vaida Bankauskaite, European Research Council, Belgium
• Marta Puyol Escolar
  (AECC) Spanish Association against Cancer, Spain

The research landscape is constantly evolving and a strong driver for change is how funding is allocated, which often links to the research strategies that funding organisations look to deliver on. As a researcher, it is important to understand how these strategies come about, how they influence funding decisions and what funders look for in applications. This panel session will bring together representatives from several public cancer research funding organisations to discuss how they set their strategies and how this impacts the way they fund research. Learn more about how decision makers view key issues in cancer research and care, what they look for in peer review and how they support early career researchers and the wider research community beyond just funding.   This session will give participants a window into the Grant maker’s point of view and provide an opportunity to ask all those burning questions you have about why money flows in the way it does. 

"Raising the bar of your research": ensuring the most rigorous design from day 1

Chapin Rodríguez, Creaducate Consulting, Germany

Cancer research is competitive: more and more people are trying to obtain funding from the same agencies as you, and trying to publish in the same journals as you. Not everyone conducts research with the same rigor, and working in a way that peer reviewers and journal editors consider "messy" can put you lower on the heap. This presentation will explore trends in cancer research and examples of strong research designs in cancer-related studies to invite you to reflect on our own work within the broader field and how you can capitalize on your strengths while managing your weaknesses. The presenter will draw on more than a decade's experience helping cancer researchers compete for grant funding and publish in top journals. 

"Translational Research" - A perspective from Olaia Naveiras" 

Olaia Naveiras, EPFL, Switzerland

Olaia studied Medicine at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid and pursued her Master-level studies in Immunology at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and in Harvard Medical School, where she then did her PhD within Prof. George Q Daley’s laboratory. There she focused on studying novel microenvironmental determinants of hematopoietic stem cell commitment from pluripotent stem cells, and described for the first time the role of adipocytes in adult hematopoiesis and of biomechanical forces in embryonic hematopoietic stem cell specification. This work earnt her the Hauser Award for the best research and teaching thesis at Harvard Medical School.

She then moved to Switzerland to pursue clinical training in Internal Medicine and Hematology, while continuing fundamental research within the laboratory of Prof. Matthias Lutolf at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), focusing on single-cell approaches in  hematopoiesis. She received the joint Young Investigator Award of the European Hematology Association (EHA) and the José Carreras Leukemia Foundation and funded the Laboratory of Regenerative Hematopoiesis in 2014 through a Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)-funded Assistant Professorship chair, double appointed at the Swiss Experimental Cancer Center (ISREC) and EPFL the Institute of Bioengineering. Upon completion of her clinical specialization, she combined her clinical interest in adult bone marrow failure syndromes with the study of microenvironment-driven mechanisms mediating leukemic progression in stress hematopoiesis. In 2020, she was appointed Associate Professor at the University of Lausanne (UNIL) School of Biology and Medicine, with an unique translational appointment at both the Department of Biomedical Sciences and the Hematology Service of the Department of Oncology of the Lausanne University Hospital (Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois, CHUV).

She is currently President of the International Bone Marrow Adiposity Society (BMAS), Vice-President of the Swiss Stem Cell Network (SSCN) and a member of the scientific committee of the American Society of Hematology (ASH).

Peer Reviewing

Céline Carret, EMBO Solutions, Germany

Peer review is a fundamental community endeavour to ensure that the published outputs of research are high quality, well-documented, insightful, useful and available to scientists and the public.  In this session, we will discuss the principles of peer-review (why we do it and why it is important), the approach we recommend to peer review (balancing scientific rigor and empathy), and the features of a well-written referee report. Participants would have the opportunity to reflect on their experience of peer review (as authors or referees) and the ways in which it was helpful or unhelpful to them.
Learning outcomes: why peer review is important, how to balance scientific rigor and empathy, how to approach peer reviewing a paper, how their experience of peer review has shaped their perspective.

Speaker Information

Céline completed her PhD at the University of Montpellier, France, characterising host immunodominant antigens to fight babesiosis, a parasitic disease caused by a unicellular Apicomplexan parasite. She further developed her post-doctoral career on malaria working at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK and Instituto de Medicina Molecular in Lisbon, Portugal. Céline was an editor and Senior Editor of the journal EMBO Molecular Medicine for 9 years before joining the EMBO Solutions training team in 2020, with responsibility for the scientific skills training.

EACR-NCRI Joint Panel Discussion “Demystifying Patient & Public Involvement (PPI) in Cancer Research”

Chair: Emma Kinloch, Consumer Lead, National Cancer Research Institute (NCRI)

Panel members:

• Max Williamson, National Cancer Research Institute (NCRI), UK
• Margaret Grayson MBE, Northern Ireland Cancer Research Consumer Forum (NICRCF), UK
• Amanda McCann, UCD Conway Institute of Biomolecular and Biomedical Research, ROI
• Aaron Hannon, Luminate Medical, ROI

This session aims to explain the role of patient and public involvement (PPI) in cancer research, why it is important and how you can involve patients in your research. Panellists will share their experiences of being a PPI representative or working with PPI representatives. The session will highlight the perceived barriers to involving patients in research, and importantly how we can overcome them. We will aim to provide advice for early career researchers wanting to learn more about PPI, as well as those seeking to involve patients in their own research. 

Emma Kinloch: Emma brings with her a wealth of experience in galvanising patient involvement in research. Emma founded a London based Head and Neck cancer support group and is currently expanding her activities to set up a charity focused on rare salivary gland cancers. She is a member of the Head and Neck EURACAN domain, sits on the NCRI Head and Neck Clinical Studies Group, the Royal College of Radiologists Clinical Oncology Academic Committee and the NIHR Health Technology Assessment Prioritisation Committee B. Emma has also been an NCRI consumer representative on the NCRI Head and Neck Clinical Studies Group for the last three years.

“The endeavor of translating basic research results to clinical application” 

Panel members: 

• Marisol Soengas, Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Oncológicas, Spain
• Roger Gomis, Institute for Research in Biomedicine, Spain

María S. Soengas was born in Agolada, Pontevedra (Spain), in 1968. She embarked upon her scientific career fi rst as an undergraduate student at the Universidad de La Coruña and later at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, where she graduated in Molecular Biology. There she received her PhD with First Class Honours for her studies on molecular mechanisms of DNA replication at the laboratory of M. Salas, Centro de Biología Molecular "Severo Ochoa".

In 1997 Soengas moved to the S. Lowe´s group at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York (USA), where she assessed the role of apoptosis as a tumour suppressor mechanism, with special focus on melanoma. She then joined the Department of Dermatology at the University of Michigan in 2002 to develop a basic research programme in Melanoma. Her group defined new molecular mechanisms underlying human melanoma initiation, progression and chemoresistance.  Since 2008, Soengas leads the Melanoma Group at the CNIO. The main objective of her team is to translate basic research in melanoma to the clinic by identifying novel markers of this disease and targets for drug development.

Soengas has been recipient of fellowships and awards from both the Human Frontiers in Science Programme and the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society of America. She has also received a Life Science Biomedical Scholar Award from the University of Michigan, the Diana Ashby Young Investigator Award from the Society for Melanoma Research as well as Career Development Awards from the American Dermatology Foundation, the Elsa V. Pardee Foundation and the V Foundation for Cancer Research. She has also been honoured with the Premio M. Josefa Wonenburger from the Xunta de Galicia.

Roger Gomis is an ICREA Research Professor and a member of the Oncology Program at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine, Barcelona. He received his PhD in biochemistry from the University of Barcelona in 2002, and was a postdoctoral fellow at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. In 2007, he assumed his current position. Since 2018 he is an associate professor at the University of Barcelona. Dr. Roger Gomis is interested in how growth factors, signaling pathways, and gene expression programs control normal cell behaviour and cancer cell metastasis. Driven by the problem of metastasis, which is the cause of 90% of cancer deaths, his laboratory is pursuing the molecular and genetic mechanisms of metastasis. In particular, identifying  genes that enable cancer to metastasize clinically relevant sites. In 2012 Roger founded Inbiomotion as an ICREA and IRB Barcelona spin-off company from his research.