CV (Sandra, Van Vlierberghe)

Name: Sandra Van Vlierberghe

Nationality: Belgian

Date of birth: 10th July 1981

Current position:10% Professor at University of Antwerp (Belgium)

20% Professor at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium)

70% Assistant Professor at Ghent University (Belgium)

Research interests: polymer synthesis, biopolymer modification, polymer processing and characterization, hydrogels, tissue engineering

Position applied for:

x / Spokesperson
Website responsible
YSF industry contacts
YSF educational officer

Attendance of past ESB conferences: present in 2005, 2007, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014

______

Candidate:

Motivation:I have already been active in the YSF board since a few years. Initially, I was appointed as local chapter representative. During that period, I have appointed several young investigators who are currently still active in YSF activities, in their respective countries throughout Europe. During that time period, we focused on increasing awareness and disseminating YSF initiatives and activities within Europe with the aid of the local chapters taking advantage of the concept: ‘Think global, act local’. After the previous YSF spokesperson left the board, my task shifted from being local representative responsible to becoming spokesperson. Since then I have mainly been involved in the organization of YSF workshops together with the local organizers and the YSF board during the annual ESB meetings, at WBC but also as dedicated events throughout the year. Moreover, we have tried to broaden the YSF horizon from a European towards a more global perspective. Indeed, we have initiated liaisons with China, Australia and Canada and we presented the aim of YSF at several conferences including IMRC in Mexico. In conclusion, YSF has gained increasing attention worldwide recently and is eliciting greater impact in the biomaterials field than ever before because of our joint efforts and presence at many international conferences. It would be extremely rewarding to be able to continue being part of such a dynamic organization and to observe the outcome of many of our recent initiatives.

Possible Achievements: I would like to continue with existing initiatives and launch new ones in parallel. For example, a general questionnaire is currently being assembled by several of our local chapters. Ideally, these will all be merged into one single master file to become distributed throughout Europe and beyond with the aid of our local chapters. The idea behind the questionnaire is to maximize the involvement of young scientists in decisions made by the YSF board (e.g. which topics should be tackled during upcoming workshops, what kind of social events would you like to attend during conferences, what info is missing in YSF newsletters, …). Furthermore, we would also like to offer a platform for young researchers where they can retrieve all relevant info with respect to their career (academia versus industry, job openings), funding opportunities (e.g. project funding, fellowshop availabilities, etc.), mental and personal health (e.g. work/life balance, time management, …). Currently, we are also evaluating the possibility to train young scientists to become a reviewer for scientific journals. The latter is currently in a preliminary phase with the help of the editors of Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Medicine. We are convinced that young scientists can benefit significantly from such a training as it will also enable them to write down their own results into a strong paper with sufficiently solid arguments to ensure acceptance of their paper in highly renowned journals. Ideally, we would like to offer such a training to an increasing amount of young scientists and in collaboration with many additional journals.

Past initiatives which have been very successful, will be repeated. Some of those include, yet are not limited to, the organization of rapid fire sessions to also provide an opportunity to young scientists to orally present their work at an international conference, the appointment of a junior chairperson to chair a scientific session during a congress, …

Communication skills:

Dutch:mother language

English: fluent

French:passive knowledge

German:passive knowledge

Any other ideas/remarks:As already indicated above, I would like to continue streamlining YSF initiatives with global initiatives which have proven their use (e.g. the CREATE initiative which is in place in Canada) and exchanging ideas with global and EU local chapters in order to enable implementation of the best initiatives of all regions at European level. Furthermore, we would like to organize a mentor/mentee programto enable junior scientists to communicate with and to receive advice from highly renowned scientists worldwide whom they normally would never have the opportunity/courage to approach.A final suggestion would be to create databases which all young scientists could consult when looking for a job opening fitting their profile (i.e. combining all biomaterial-related positions in academia and industry worldwide). The latter would imply a fast and straightforward tool suiting your needs after having finalized a master dissertation, a PhD or a post-doctoral fellowship. In addition, an interactive, on-line YSF platform could be launched at which young scientists could post their questions/comments for other researchers to answer.