The 9th DZL Annual Meeting took place on January 23 and 24, 2020 in Lübeck-Travemünde, bringing together around 500 scientists, physicians, and junior researchers from five sites. On the day before the meeting, several work groups of the Disease Areas studied at the DZL already came together. Prof. Dr. Werner Seeger, DZL Spokesman, opened the Annual Meeting looking back on a successful year and welcoming 15 new Principal Investigators and Fellows at the DZL as well as six members of the International Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) of the DZL as guests of honor of the meeting.
The welcome was followed by the reports and highlight presentations from the eight Disease Areas and two Platforms of the DZL. This year again, the proven approach was maintained, allowing the scientists to present their research work not only in the form of posters but also as short teaser talks and participate in the poster prize contest. All submitted posters could be inspected in two moderated sessions and were also open for inspection to the attendees throughout the conference. The poster prize winners were elected in an evening ceremony. They had the honor to present their projects in a longer version to the whole plenary session on the second day of the conference. Each prize was endowed with 500 euros. The last part of the evening event was the premiere of the new DZL image film, which is now also publicly available at www.dzl.de.
Another highlight of this year’s Annual Meeting was the meet-the-expert session of the Imaging Platform, in which experts provided information on the latest imaging techniques and potential cooperation possibilities in the field of lung research at seven booths with partly fully assembled measuring devices. These booths addressed topics such as machine learning and artificial intelligence for the further development of the radiomics and image-omics technology, correlated 3D multimodal imaging, or the creation of the human 3D cell atlas.
For the second time in a row, the Annual Meeting was opened on the evening before the meeting for DZL junior researchers with the exclusive DZL Academy Fellow Reception. Around 120 junior researchers from all DZL sites used the event for networking and the exchange on common topics of basic scientific as well as of scientific and clinical career paths.
The DZL Academy currently has 334 Fellows, 187 of whom are women; compared to the 8th Annual Meeting, this means an overall increase of 52 new members. In addition to regular promotional opportunities, such as mobility grants for research trips, the Academy also offers other attractive possibilities to junior researchers. For instance, in November 2019, Academy Fellows had the chance to take part in the DZG Nature Masterclass. The workshop on scientific writing led by the Nature editors Christoph Schmitt and Joao Monteiro was a joint offer of the German Centers for Health Research (DZG). In March 2020, the DZG workshop on science communication took place at the National Institute for Science Communication (NaWik) in Karlsruhe. The workshop was held in both German and English by the science journalist and TV host Dr. Ulrike Brandt-Bohne and the science journalist Ingo Knopf. The early career scientists learned to present their projects in a way that is easily understandable for everyone and developed outreach projects they could potentially implement at the Berlin Science Week in November.
