2023 on the FEBS Network!

FEBS has a wide range of activities for molecular life scientists and we are delighted to feature these opportunities on the FEBS Network. We also share activities and opportunities from other organisations that might be interesting to the community.
Like every year, we featured the FEBS Congress and shared interviews with plenary speakers (try Eileen Furlong or Eric Westhof from the 2023 Congress). We also shared FEBS events for young scientists, such as the Young Scientists' Forum and the FEBS-IUBMB-ENABLE conference, and featured key events from FEBS Constituent Societies and other partner organisations, such as IUBMB's Biomolecular Horizons 2024.
Students and young researchers are often looking for career and networking opportunities. We flagged the FEBS Summer Fellowships and FEBS Short-Term Fellowships for them, and for those considering a postdoc we shared a post on how to choose a place effectively. For those considering extracurricular activities, we shared a post on how preLights can widen your research area, what does an eLife Community Ambassador do, or how to learn about preprints from ASAPbio.
The FEBS Junior Section continues to be very active, using the FEBS Network to share recordings of their online talks and interviews to introduce themselves and encourage other young scientists to join their initiative. We also shared events from the IUBMB Trainee Initiative, such as this one on developing your brand as a scientist.
With more established researchers, we featured their exciting research (for example, from Benjamin Schumann at the Francis Crick Institute, UK) and we highlighted those who received the FEBS Excellence Award (try Mikolaj Ogrodnik or Carina Soares-Cunha from last year winners). For researchers who want to widen their horizons, we shared posts on developing bioinformatics skills and on translational research.
And of course we also featured posts from and about senior researchers, such as Reinhard Jahn's view on being a group leader, Ewan Birney's take on human genome editing regulation, or Martina Rembold recollections of working with Maria Leptin.
For the wider community, we shared programmes and resources from the EU Research Infrastructures, collections of biosciences methods and protocols from the MIT Libraries, updates on the ARRIVE Guidelines, and useful collections of computational and bioinformatics tools. We also flagged important initiatives, such as this post from GARDP for World Antimicrobial Awareness Week, which we co-published with the Federation of European Microbiology Societies #FEMSmicroBlog.
The FEBS Network is a communications and community platform and therefore we know about the importance of science communication, public engagement and societal impact. We highlighted the FEBS Science and Society Committee activities (check out the Croatian Society HDBMB's post on the Contribution of bioscience to the green transition and you can explore other sustainability posts under our Green matters badge) and we had a FEBS Network video competition for young scientists (watch the winner's video).
The FEBS Network Viewpoints channel has a great collection of posts on how other organisations do science communication and public engagement, such as EMBL's excellent collection of activities and free resources and the brilliant UniProt blog "Protein Spotlight" by the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics. The Viewpoints channel also hosted posts on science policy (explore this post on research integrity from EMBO) or on how to build a community (check out the online resources from the Center for Scientific Collaboration and Community Engagement).
The Educator channel caters for the FEBS community of educators, featuring their webinars, upcoming conference, and sharing posts on innovative teaching methods and approaches (try this one on generative AI in assessment or this one from HHMI BioInteractive full of educational resources).
We could not finish this post without highlighting the important role that the FEBS Press journals (The FEBS Journal, FEBS Letters, FEBS Open Bio, and Molecular Oncology) play on the FEBS Network. They shared highlights of their articles (check out The FEBS Journal Words of Advice series), important announcements (such that the FEBS Press journals are now part of Review Commons), new initiatives (such as FEBS Open Bio webinars), and engaging examples of science communication (FEBS Letters' post on The Beautiful Brain documentary or Molecular Oncology's writing competition).
And now to end, we invite you to explore the FEBS Network site and complete our survey to share your feedback and suggestions with us. Thank you!
Top photo by Kira auf der Heide on Unsplash and bottom photo by Mel Poole on Unsplash
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