On the 20th of June, 2014, the 1st edition of the European Meeting of Neuroscience by PhD students took place in Grenoble Institut of Neuroscience.
The origin of the meeting
The foundation of this event was the result of the will of PhD students from the Grenoble institute of Neuroscience (the 'Neurodocs'). We wanted to create and organize a congress in our field, which will enable us to discover and to meet the actors of the european research in neuroscience.
The ambition of this meeting is to be an important event for European PhD students of neuroscience. Our goal was to enable them to share their work (through a poster or an oral presentation) in front of their peers in a relaxed atmosphere, and to acquire a first experience of a congress. This meeting also aims at allowing students to constitute a network in an autonomous and individual way. Another objective of this meeting was to allow students in their last year to get an overview of the various works led in Europe, and to get an idea of the possibilities they will face after their thesis (Post-Doc positions).
Assessment of the 1st edition
For its 1st edition, the meeting welcomed 90 participants at the Grenoble Institut of Neurosciences (GIN). It was organized around 9 oral presentations, all performed by invited PhD students, and of several poster sessions. As wished by the organizing committee, the poster sessions were mainly realized by students from the institute, with the exception of two of them that were made by foreign students who had just begun their thesis.
This event included people from several European institutes / centers of research: Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology (Magdeburg, Germany); Interdisciplinary Institute for Neuroscience (Bordeaux, France); INSERM U1118 (Strasbourg, France); National Research Council of Italy (Pisa, Italy); Cagliari University (Cagliari, Italy); Center for Integrative Biology (Trento, Italy); CNR Institute of Neuroscience (Padova, Italy); Alzheimer Neurobiology Center (Stockholm, Sweden); Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) (Lausanne, Swiss); Medical Research Council for Developmental Neurobiology (London, United Kingdom).
Themes addressed during this congress were various going from neurodegenerative diseases (ALS, FTD, Alzheimer, Parkinson) to more technical concerns (deep brain stimulation, Python, RMS contrasts, radiotherapy) including a set of different subjects: depression, bipolar disorders, mechanisms of intercell communications (endosomes, exosomes), triad in skeletic muscles, calcic channels, glioma.
Due to the success and the positive feedback of this edition, the Neurodocs team decided to perpetuate this meeting with the organization of the second edition in April 2016.
