I’m one of the organisers and we are three Chairs of this meeting. This is my fifth time which I’ve been organising these types of meetings, or schools actually, and it’s been very exciting. It’s so exciting to see each year how much involvement the students are doing and how much they contribute to the conference. The discussions are getting better and better; this year it’s been really exciting.
What makes this meeting
The difference is that they are small, a limited number of students, and they get these really… this is a long time and they get these interactions. They have time to interact also in the breaks and they can present their work in the posters and they have all these lively discussions. For them, because they are at different levels, some are PhDs, some are MDs, so it’s the mix which also is very, very important to have this mix. It’s not a specialised meeting, we try to cover everything in translational cancer research.
Why is collaboration so important?
Definitely, I think I said at a previous meeting, when it was finished I said that I hope that you go home pregnant but not really pregnant in that sense but pregnant with new ideas and new collaborations. I know that they already have had some reunions of some of the first meetings here of the young ones that have started to collaborate. This is shown today also that a lot of this research are team efforts. Interdisciplinarity is very, very important and you need all different fields that you need to work together. That’s what they see and they start to know a little bit of the whole field and then they can specialise but they know who to contact.
During my time, of course it was the early Gordon conferences that you selected students to go to the Gordon conferences. You had to be there all the time and also as speakers you had to be there for at least more than two days so you could interact. That’s what we urge the speakers to do is also to interact with the students. So it has been but it’s been much more limited in that sense. It’s been the Gordon conferences that very specific topics so the extraordinary with this one is that it’s really trying to cover the field from the basic science to the really clinical to the epidemiology to science policy to drug discovery. So that’s the beauty of this one, that they get a touch of everything in one week.
What should the students take from this?
I hope that they have learned that the interdisciplinarity or the multidisciplinarity is going to be very important for their future career. It’s not only multidisciplinarity but it’s also multiprofessionality, that you need to work with the clinicians, the MDs and the non-MDs, we had some physicists here. The group I’m missing here is actually some mathematicians, model builders, so hopefully we can attract some of them next year to have some of the young bio-informaticians that really want to do the modelling at the mathematical level.
