SAFEAqua Kick-Off Meeting during 24 – 27 April 2017 at Institut Pasteur, Paris, France
The SAFE-Aqua Kick-off Meeting started with a welcome address by Prof. Frédéric Tangy, Scientific Coordinator of SAFE-Aqua, explaining how the consortium members met and decided on working together on the project. It was followed by a brief project overview by Wanilada Rungrassamee, on behalf of Nitsara Karoonuthaisiri, Scientific coordinator of the project at BIOTEC. All meeting participants then briefly introduced themselves and presented their involvement in the project.
All WP Leaders presented the objectives of their respective work packages, as well as the identified tasks/sub-tasks and participants involved. Focus was also placed on the expected Deliverables and Milestones. All staff involved in the project and present at the meeting worked together on planning work for WP2 Genome sequencing, WP3 Shrimp immunome, and WP4 Gut microbiome.
Workshop on Shrimp Genomics and Bioinformatics was organised on the second day. This workshop covered all major techniques of next-generation sequencing including genotyping, genomics and transcriptomics as well as the application of PacBio, Gene expression profiling with Illumina, and SHAMAN (SHiny Application for Metagenomics ANalysis) on research activities under SAFEAqua project.
The third day was dedicated to project management training, which was organised by the Grants office. This training covered the EU policy monitoring and lobbying, EU project management and success story of INFRAVEC2, an EU-funded project.
This meeting ended with the scientific writing training, which consisted of a half-day conference by Dr. Sean McCarthy, who specialised in implement European Research Strategies within organisations. The presentation focused on how to write successful H2020 project proposals, highlighting the importance of a well-defined “Impact” strategy for projects and on a typical H2020 project writing timeline.
