MCAA and EURAXESS – Washington, DC

MCAA and EURAXESS – Washington, DC

In late October I wrote a post about the creation of the North American chapter of the Marie Curie Alumni Association (MCAA) – you can see our logo above – mentioning that the official inauguration would take place in Washington, DC at the beginning of December.

I was not sure if I could take part in it, but eventually I found time – and money, thanks to the appreciated support of MCAA, which covered part of the expenses 🙂 – and so in the past days I flew to the East Coast.

The official launch of the Chapter was organized in the context of the EURAXESS’s 3rd Annual Meeting of Scientific Diasporas in North America, held at the Embassy of France on December 11. EURAXESS is a EU institution which promotes the access (thus the name) of researchers from all over the world to our continent, and its annual event here in North America has precisely the objective of gathering researchers and stakeholders in order to exchange ideas and promote possible interactions.

It was a very interesting event! As the MCAA North American chapter, we organized a round table to present our new organization and to explain how we could contribute to the collaborations between Europe and North America. In addition to that, there were many talks by representatives from several European countries who expressed their view on the main topic and, in particular, illustrated the opportunities offered by their countries. Italy was there, naturally, being represented by Dr. Stefano Lami, scientific responsible at our embassy in the United States.

The previous day, we members of the chapter had had an informal pre-meeting to meet us in person and organize the following day’s event. In that occasion, I had the chance of meeting really brilliant guys who have been developing the Marie Curie project in the United States or Canada. I was not the only Italian, by the way: Giovanni Sogari, a food economist from the University of Parma and now visiting Cornell University, also joined the group (you can give a look at his very cool blog).

Bottom line, taking part in this event was really an excellent idea: first of all I got to know many brilliant researchers with whom I would like to stay in touch also we I am back to Italy, plus I discovered a lot of opportunities for possible future research, which is always very good!

Here some pictures from the EURAXESS event:

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