In April I wrote a post about my meeting with another Marie Curie Fellow here at UC Berkeley, Johannes Schoeneberg. As you can read there, I managed to get in touch with him thanks to Catarina Ferreira, another former Marie Curie Fellow who was promoting the creation of the North American Chapter of the Marie Curie Alumni Association (MCAA). As the name clearly suggests, this is the association of the past and present Marie Curie fellows.

The proposal for the North American Chapter was finally accepted by MCAA at the beginning of September and in the past weeks the management team started its activities. A facebook page and a webpage have been set up.

At first I had thought that I could take part in the leading team, but the preparatory work was mostly carried out in the first part of my experience here in the US, so I preferred to focus on settling down and starting my research activity. Plus, I wanted to leave room to those who had more experience than me as Marie Curie fellows and/or to those who would remain in the US and Canada longer than me (after all, I will go back home in few months). However, I did give a small contribution to the work, and of course I will be happy to participate in the initiatives of the group. By the way, Johannes himself will be the coordinator of the USA-West area.

The official launch of the Chapter will take place on December 11 in Washington, DC in conjunction with EURAXESS’s 3rd Annual Meeting of Scientific Diasporas in North America (more info about EURAXESS can be found here). The venue will be the Embassy of France. I am not sure yet if I will be able to attend the event, but I would really love to: it would be great to get in touch with the North American MCAA community, and the EURAXESS meeting will surely be very interesting as well. We’ll see!