CENTURI Internal newsletter #25 December 2020
CENTURI Internal newsletter #25 December 2020
Summary
Calls
CENTURI 2021 PhD Call
CENTURI is collecting PhD project proposals for our 2021 call until December 31, 2020. CENTURI will fund up to 16 PhD fellowships, to start between October and December 2021.
As usual, CENTURI is collecting interdisciplinary projects between at least two research teams, in priority from different research institutes.
Projects have to be submitted via our intranet at the following address: https://centuri-livingsystems.org/member-area/project-centuri-call/
Please note that you need to be logged in in order to access this page. The registration page is available at this address: https://centuri-livingsystems.org/member-area/register/
CENTURI PhD call agenda
- Collection of proposals from CENTURI laboratories: November 16 to December 31
- Eligibility check by the CORES: January 12
- Call open for applications: January 14 – February 19
- Evaluation of the applications by the PIs: February 20 – March 7
- First meeting of the evaluation committee: between March 9 and March 11
- Interviews of shortlisted candidates by the evaluation committee: April 20 to April 22
- Decision from the steering committee: April 27
- Expected decision from the candidates: May 4
CENTURI Tech Transfer Call
The auditions for our Tech Transfer call took place on November 10, 2020. Projects were evaluated first by CENTURI Tech Transfer and Engineering committee, then by an ad hoc committee and three will be funded by CENTURI, from December 2020:
- CENTURIM, proposed by Thomas Lecuit (IBDM)
- ICOVELL, proposed by Anne Charrier (CINAM)
- ShIVA - Shiny Interface for Visualization and Analysis of single-cell data, proposed by Pierre Milpied (CIML), Sébastien Jaeger (CIML) and Lionel Spinelli (CIML – TAGC)
A Tech Transfer day will be organized in Spring 2021 to present these projects to the entire CENTURI community.
CENTURIM aims to develop an original instrumentation (RIM: Random illumination Microscopy) on the Luminy site allowing access to ultra-resolved fluorescence imaging in biological samples (cells and model systems). The project consists in building a RIM microscope and developing the algorithms and codes necessary for the reconstruction of ultra-resolved and sectioned images. CENTURIM was granted a €80,000 investment budget and some dedicated time of the optics engineer of CENTURI multiengineering platform (30% of FTE, for one year).
ICOVELL aims to build a chemical etching device on the Luminy site enabling to manufacture submicron microfluidic channels with high aspect ratios and with a very low size variability. Such microfluidic devices are engineered for biomimetic studies of the passage of circulating cells such as red blood cells, immune cells or parasites through very narrow passages such as the interendothelial slits in the spleen. ICOVELL was granted an investment budget of 20k€ and 30% of a full time equivalent of Mathias Lechelon, CENTURI mechatronics engineer.
ShIVA (Shiny Interface for Visualization and Analysis of single-cell datasets) aims to develop an interactive software which would allow biologists to be autonomous autonomy in the analysis of their single sell sequencing data, via a graphical interface. This software allows the analysis of data from different single-cell sequencing technologies (scRNA-seq, CITE-seq), used in different disciplines: immunology, developmental biology, neuroscience, etc. The Shiva project was granted an investment budget of 5K€ and a software engineer or bioinformatician expert in R programming language, for one year, for the development of the software.
Events
CENTURI Career Meetings: Hervé Rigneault (Institut Fresnel)
The 3rd CENTURI Career Meeting (our monthly event for PhD students and postdocs) will take place on December 17 with Professor Hervé Rigneault (Institut Fresnel).
Career meetings aim to give participants the opportunity to discover other career perspectives and career paths than academia, while thinking about your career wishes.
Hervé Rigneault is a physicist who is leading the MOSAIC group at the Institut Fresnel. He cofounded in 2019 the start-up Lightcore Technologies, which develops cutting-edge nonlinear optical imaging technologies for biomedical and scientific applications.
This meeting will take place via Zoom. Please contact Melina De Oliveira(melina.de-oliveira@univ-amu.fr) to register or if you have any questions regarding our Career Meetings.
CENTURI PhD / Postdoc Day
Our last CENTURI PhD & Postdoc day took place on November 20, as an online event.
This special edition of our CENTURI scientific day promoted the work of Postdocs and PhD students from our community via 17 talks and 18 posters. The event gathered 172 members of our community throughout the day. The videos of the talk are available online, links to the videos are available in the news section of our intranet.
Education
CENTURI Summer School 2021
CENTURI is organising the third edition of our Summer School, from June 15 to June 24, 2021, on the Luminy campus.
The interdisciplinary summer school is coupled with an internship program, proposing up to 5 funded internships in our research laboratories (3 to 6 months).
Entitled “From data to biology and back – Reverse engineering biological networks”, this interdisciplinary training program aims to build bridges between engineers and scientists. It is a unique opportunity for MSc students and students from engineering schools with backgrounds in physics, mathematics and computational sciences to apply their skills to biological questions.
The summer school will include lectures from 5 prominent speakers: Daphné Bavelier (Université de Genève), Bernard Malissen (CIML), Carsten Marr (ICB, Munich), Yiota Poirazi (IMBB/FORTH) & Mickael Tanter (ESPCI).
Miscellaneous
PhD and Postdoc representatives at the CENTURI steering committee
We are glad to announce that 3 representatives have been selected by the PhD and Postdocs of our community to join CENTURI steering committee. Their mission will be to represent their fellow PhD students and postdocs, by sharing proposals / ideas from their colleagues but also inform them of the decisions taken by the steering committee.
The 3 representatives are:
- PhD: Sanjay Karki (IBDM) and Sebastien Choteau (TAGC – CIML)
- Postdoc: Céline Dinet (IBDM – LCB)
CENTURI has also created a dedicated Slack channel for our PhD and postdoc community. A mailing list was also created interested PhD students and postdocs from the community.
PhD students & Postdoc interested in joining the PhD / Postdoc mailing list & Slack channel are welcome to contact CENTURI communication officer: Gael Le Mehaute until December 18, 2020 – Alizée Guarino from December 21, 2020.
CENTURI Slack
A general Slack channel for the entire CENTURI community was created in November 2020! We believe that this tool will be of great help to communicate between each other and organize new events, such as online thematic events.
You will find 2 standard channels:
- a general channel to ask / propose anything
- a channel directly to ask question to the governance team “ask the governance team”
All of our members are free to create channels to suit their needs and manage them as they see fit. CENTURI communication officer will simply supervise the channels.
New CENTURI Communication Officer
Gael Le Mehaute, CENTURI Communication officer, will leave the project on December 18, 2020. Gael joined CENTURI in July 2017 and will be replaced by Alizée Guarino in early January 2021.
Next CENTURI seminars
- External Seminar - December 07: Claude Loverdo (ENS Paris)
- Internal Seminar - December 14: Rosa Cossart (INMED)
How development shapes memory circuits
- External Seminar - January 25: Emilie Franceschinio (LMA)
- External Seminar - February 1st: Petra Vertes (Cambridge University)
- Internal Seminar - February 08 - Juan Reguera (AFMB)
- External Seminar - February 15 - Sara Filippi (Imperial College)