UV4Plants News (2015-10-01)

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Dear UV4Plants members,

It has been a long time since I last wrote to you. My apologies for this long period of silence. Yet, despite the silence, lots of things have happened behind the screens, and the association for plant UV Research, UV4Plants, is now firmly established.

Administrative hurdles were more cumbersome than anticipated. I never thought that opening a bank account for an association, without attracting tax liabilities, would be so difficult. However, now that “administrative aspects” are finalised, the focus is shifting to scientific activities (Thanks to Matthew Robson and Gyula Czégény). In this sense I want to emphasise that the association very much welcomes ideas from members for future activities. The association strongly encourages members to take advantage of UV4Plants when initiating activities such as lab-exchanges, training schools, and Europe (or world?)-wide joint experiments, similar to the wine-leaf, Arabidopsis and Lolium experiments, which were such highlights of COST Action UV4Growth. Ultimately, the association will be what the members make of it! Please feel free to use the UV4Plants linkedin group (https://www.linkedin.com/grp/home?gid=6961083) to share and explore ideas. Also, members of the management committee (see UV4Plants website) will be very happy to hear from you!

Here a flavour of what you already might expect from UV4Plants in the coming months:

  • Continuous development of the UV4Plants website (http://www.uv4plants.org/) and the Linkedin-profile (https://www.linkedin.com/grp/home?gid=6961083)
  • Development of the UV4Plant bulletin. The first issue will be available in a few weeks.
  • Development of further links with stakeholders to facilitate coordination of research activities, help academics achieve commercial impact of research, and to identify partners for EU-or national grant applications
  • Organisation of an international Plant-UV conference in Pécs-Hungary in May 2016. Exact date to be confirmed, but will be second half of May.
    • Additional fund raising for the plant conference in Pécs has already started. However, I would very much welcome additional ideas that can help us raise funding, even if this is just sponsorship of coffees, or of a single speaker. Please feel free to contact me at m.jansen@ucc.ie.
    • Tentatively the programme will be:
      • Day 1: Arrival in Pécs, Hungary
      • Day 2-3 UV4Plants meeting including General Meeting UV4Plants.
      • Day 4: School (restricted attendance) 4-6 lectures, morning and afternoon
      • Day 5: Leave
    • It is anticipated that members can take advantage of a discounted registration rate, while 2015 and 2016-membership UV4Plants fees will also be used to support the conference. Discussions are still ongoing on the numbers of (younger) researchers that can attend the additional training school, but Pécs University will make free accommodation available for the lecturers. Once dates for the conference and school have been finalised, we will have a call for these “lecturing jobs”. Finally, we will also hold our first General Meeting of the association during the conference, and this will be a good opportunity to steer the direction of UV4Plants.

Best wishes,

Marcel

Dr Marcel Jansen,

School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences,

UCC, Cork, Ireland

Additional items added by the webmaster:

Pécs

Pécs. Source https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/P%C3%A9cs_Montage.jpg.

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