ERC Starting Grant Winners

ERC awards the most important grants to researchers in Europe. For young researchers (2-7 years after PhD), the ERC has Starting Grants. The goal for these starting grants is for these young researchers to start their own group and line of research. This year results have been published (here) and of course, I checked which of these grants are related to medical imaging. There were 3329 applications and 287 researchers were successful. The ERC grants are divided in three big areas: 1) Physical Sciences and Engineering, 2) Life Sciences, 3) Social Sciences and Humanities. Medical imaging fits in Life Sciences and more concretely in LS7 - Diagnostic tools. There were 8 starting grants related to Medical Imaging:

Daniela Thorwarth, Erlangen University, Germany - Biologically individualized, model-based  radiotherapy on the basis of multi-parametric molecular tumour profiling.

Julien Valette, CEA, France - Exploring brain intracellular space using diffusion-weighted NMR spectroscopy in vivo

Galia Blum, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel - Protease Activated X-Ray Contrast Agents for 

Molecular Imaging of Vulnerable Atherosclerotic Plaques and Cancer Development using Spectral CT.

Rachel Katz-Brull, Hadassah Medical Organization, Israel - Citicoline and deoxyglucose as new molecular imaging probes of DNP hyperpolarized MRI for cancer and neuroimaging

Niv Papo, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel - Developing Multispecific Biological Agents that
Target Tumor Neovasculature for Cancer Imaging and Therapy

Francesco Ricci, University of Rome "Tor Vergata", Italy - Nature-inspired theranostic nanodevices for tumor imaging, early diagnosis and targeted drug-release

Mangala Srinivas, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands - Clinical ultrasound platform for the quantitative and longitudinal imaging of theranostics and cellular therapy

Jaco Zwanenburg, University Medical Centre, Utrecht, The Netherlands - Towards understanding cerebral small vessel disease: Innovative, MRI-based, functional markers to discover the terra incognita between large vessels and macroscopic brain lesions

Congratulations to all the winners! But I still have a favorite grant and therefore, one of the papers related to that grant can be read here:

Daniela Thorwarth, Susanne-Martina Eschmann, Frank Paulsen, Markus Alber. (2006). Hypoxia Dose Painting by Numbers: A Planning Study International Journal of Radiation Oncology * Biology * Physics DOI: 10.1016/j.ijrobp.2006.11.061

European Month of the Brain

Today starts the European Month of the Brain. I certainly hoped that this information would have been publicized much more. I only come to this information by chance. Let's hope we hear more about this during this month!

"Brain research in Europe needs a decisive effort. We must invest more, define clearer and more innovative research and healthcare strategies, and better coordinate national efforts. We therefore decided to make May 2013 the European Month of the Brain - a full month packed with events and activities to make decision-makers, stakeholders, the media and the public aware of the successes achieved and the challenges still laying ahead for brain research."



The main webpage is here and links about funding are also very useful.

Marie Curie Fellowships

If you are about to finish your PhD or have just finished, you can consider applying to a Marie Curie Fellowship. The main idea of these fellowships is to support researchers to move to a European country to perform top research. The next deadlines are in August, but if you are really serious about this, you should start now.

Here is some advice about these fellowships:
1. Read carefully the documentation to find out if you eligible and what you will need. 
2. Start preparing the proposal early enough: contact your host institution and supervisor in charge and then start writing!
3. Don't be afraid to market yourself in the proposal and make sure you have something written about every evaluation point. 
4. Ask many people to review it: from the field and outside the field, the National Contact Points can also review it...
5. Get the support letters to your proposal (3 if possible).

6. If possible, get your hands in somebody else proposal from previous years...





Official Information can be found here, and unofficial information can be found here.
Advices to write a good proposal here.

Obama's BRAIN Initiative

On the 2nd April, President Obama has made a speech about a new initiative to study the brain. This new initiative is called BRAIN - Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies.This initiative has been inspired in the Genome Project. His speech can be seen here or read here.



For me, the most important remark was: "So there is this enormous mystery waiting to be unlocked, and the BRAIN Initiative will change that by giving scientists the tools they need to get a dynamic picture of the brain in action and better understand how we think and how we learn and how we remember. " My work is close to this idea using, of course, medical imaging, so I am really interested in this initiative.




About the budget involved, it might be considerably smaller than the Genome Project (3.8 billion), but the announced kick-start for the project was about 100$ million, while for the Genome Project was 28$ million. This kick-start will fund projects in the scope of the initiative: 50$ million from DARPA, 40$ million from NIH and 20$ million from NSF. Private sector will also contribute about 158$ million: 60$ million from the Allen Institute for Brain Science, 30$ million from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, 28$ million from Salk Institute for Biological Studies and 4$ million from the Kavli Foundation, among others.

White House links: Blog, Fact Sheet and Infographics

Scientist are snobs?

A great friend of mine has suggested that I read the article Lab life: Scientists are snobs. I have read it and I agree with a lot of what is written. I am European, so instead of states which are less funded, we have countries which are less funded than others, because these big labs are indeed in only some of these countries. Coming from a less funded country and lab, I actually always have a good amount of people in my posters, but I rarely get citations to my work... And I have to confess that at conferences, my first priority is to see all presentations and posters from my specific field and only after I go for the big lab names... And do supervisors have more time in small labs? Actually I think it depends on the supervisor...

What are your views on this?

The Human Brain Project

The European Commission has officially announced the selection of the Human Brain Project (HBP) as one of its two FET (Future and Emerging Technologies) Flagship projects. The new project will coordinate European efforts to address one of the greatest challenges of modern science: understanding the human brain.

"Understanding the human brain is one of the greatest challenges facing 21st century science. If we can rise to the challenge, we can gain profound insights into what makes us human, develop new treatments for brain diseases and build revolutionary new computing technologies."


"According to a recent report, nearly one-third of the European population is affected by some kind of psychiatric or neurological disease (anxiety, mood disorders, neurodegenerative disease, etc.)."

The promoting video is very instructive and I'm very exciting about the database with medical images, of course... I hope this project will be very successful!

Invest in Science

 There has been some discussion in Europe about funding science. Europe has always invested less money and less strategically in Science than USA, and we are losing our best brains... Gottfried Schatz, a prize winning biologist, which has worked in Europe and USA, has called European funding MESS: Mediocre European Science System. Although I think he is being too radical about the science system, he might prove to be correct in the future if investment in science stops. A petition with more than 150.000 signatures in being held in: http://www.no-cuts-on-research.eu/.

Recently, I came across this webpage http://investinscience.eu/category/videos/ , where researchers and other can post videos to promote science in Europe. Without much effort, they are better than the infamous videos that the European Comission made:

Links:
European Science Foundation - http://www.esf.org/
European Commission CORDIS - http://cordis.europa.eu/home_en.html