Fun fact: FEBS Open Bio maintains a longstanding connection with FEBS Advanced Courses. These interactive courses designed to foster scientific exchange and offer valuable career-development opportunities have long featured our involvement, with editors regularly attending to provide insights into scientific publishing, sponsor poster prizes, and promote the journal within the community. Here, we highlight the recent Advanced Courses attended by FEBS Open Bio editors in 2025 so far.  

Last month, we took part in the EMBO-FEBS Lecture Course “Cell biology of host-pathogen interactions” held in Blois, France. The course aimed to explore the mechanisms underlying the changes in host cell structure and metabolism during microbial infection, and the technological advancements in illuminating host-pathogen interactions. As part our objective to support early-career researchers, we sponsored a €200 poster prize, which was awarded to Edoardo Scarpa (University of Milan), for his poster titled “Senescent cell: the chamber of secrets of chronic intracellular mycobacterial infections”. The course included talks from Maria Mota on Inter-Kingdom interaction in Malaria, Lena Pernas on Microbe-Mitochondria conflict, and many more.  

This month, we attended the FEBS Advanced Lecture Course, “Biological surfaces and interfaces: Biointerfaces at lipids, proteins and polymers” in Sant Feliu de Guixols, Spain. The course explored the complex molecular interactions at different biointerface levels and the multiple clinical implications of this interdisciplinary area of research from broad-spectrum antiviral drug development to cancer diagnosis. The journal once again sponsored a €200 poster prize, this time awarded to Kalyan Vaid (Polish Academy of Sciences), for his poster titled “Examining Multi-Component Lipid Membranes for Controlled Interaction with Nanocarriers”. A plenary lecture on Women in Science was delivered by Claudia Steinem, along with keynote lectures from Paul Cremer and Dimitrios Stamou, who covered the field of biointerfaces in the broader scientific and social context.  

FEBS Advanced courses are aimed at providing research updates, training and networking opportunities to researchers, and it is the income from FEBS Open Bio and other FEBS Press journals that makes these events possible. By reading and publishing with us, you too can help fund them.  

If you’d like to learn more about publishing with us, don’t forget to stop by our stand at the upcoming FEBS Congress in Istanbul. We’ll also be holding a ‘Meet the Editors’ session on Tuesday 8^th July at 11:30 am, where we welcome you to discuss your research and potential submissions with us.

We look forward to seeing you there! 

^{Top image by fongfong2 from Getty Images (sourced from Canva)}