WP4WP4 - VPH Training and Career Development
information and Communication Technologies Department
Universitat Pompeu Fabra, UPF
c/Tànger 122-140- E08018
Barcelona - Spain
WP4 team: Key tasks
- VPH Integrative Study Plan - assessment of NoE partner course/teaching capabilities and requirements (2008)
- VPH Industrial and Clinical Careers Assessment (2009)
- VPH Training scheme (late 2010 onwards)
- VPH Study Groups (2009 onwards)
- Analysis/promotion of mobility schemes for VPH researchers (Summer 2009)
- Formal Strategy Document advising on VPH training and careers (end of project)
- VPH Educational Materials, including VPH Textbook (end of projects)
Coordinator: UPF
WP4 will address training and career development for both early and in-career VPH researchers. Activities will also pay special attention to the outcomes generated from other VPH-related projects and existing EC-initiatives (e.g. Marie Curie), in order to ensure complimentarity with existing activities. The ultimate goal of this WP will be the design and implementation of actions directed at the development of VPH research education and careers, and will relate closely to WP5 .
Detail
Education plays an essential role in the achievement of the ambitious objectives of the European Union, as stated by the EU at the Lisbon Summit, March 2000, “to become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based society in the world capable of sustained economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion.” (Excerpt from foreword by Vivian Reding, European Commissioner for Education and Culture, Curriculum Development Guidelines. New ICT). The strategic dimension of interdisciplinary research as a base to succeed in the new knowledge-based society has not been identified until recently. Indeed specialisation has been the major driver for most educational programmes.
The VPH approach offers a groundbreaking opportunity to contribute to this strategic focus in healthcare, an environment in which there could be tremendous economic and societal impact. This wealth of opportunities has been partially explored by some recent initiatives at European and international levels. All these initiatives, promoted by national reference research bodies in medicine, sciences and engineering, concur in indicating the vast unexploited opportunities, but also the need to “build capacity in terms of human capital (…)future generations will require formal training in biological, engineering and mathematical sciences, with undergraduates exposed to interdisciplinary problems while being trained in a core discipline”.(Academy of Medical Sciences and the Royal Academy of Engineering. Systems Biology: a vision for engineering and medicine, February 2007)
This WP defines a pragmatic and realistic set of tasks to be carried out during the lifetime of the VPH NoE. In the short-term, emphasis will be placed on the development and evaluation of mechanisms that foster interdisciplinary training experiences, led by UNOTT and UPF. The findings from such activities will be augmented by the outcome of a concurrent analysis of current and future highly qualified staff requirements in industrial and clinical environments. This study will be led by USFD. It is hoped that the findings of both exercises, when combined, will serve to initiate wider and longer-term efforts across institutions within the European Research Area in interdisciplinary training and education.
Academic Policy and Integrative Studies
- Academic Policy and Integrative Studies will seek to foster institutional support within VPH NoE member institutions for the creation of an interdisciplinary, European-wide study programme.
- Academic Integrative Plan and Pilot
- Industrial and Clinical Needs Assessment (Careers)
Community building is a key aim for the NoE, and the creation of a training community is core to the activities that will be developed during subsequent stages of the NoE as we strive to reach a critical mass of students from institutions throughout Europe. Training will play a primary role in the long-term sustainability of the VPH NoE with training activities closely related to actions carried out in the other workpackages reinforcing synergies through integration.
VPH Early Career Training programme
The training strategy is designed to address different priorities throughout time, introducing clearly differentiated objectives for each period (short-, medium- and long-term).
The main goal of the short-term activities is the ‘VPH Initiation Programme’, which develops a spectrum of activities targeting specific needs and/or researchers, and focuses on satisfying pragmatic training requirements that will produce concrete activities. The medium-term activities are designed to foster the establishment of a formal interdisciplinary European-wide system of VPH training that could be realised in the long-term. A key long-term objective is to provide a sustainable training route for early career researchers.
The training objectives of the VPH NoE are two-fold. The first objective is to provide specific training on VPH-related tools, data, data-handling and modelling. The second is to foster institutional support within VPH NoE member-institutions for the creation of an interdisciplinary European-wide study programme. Such activities will form an important part of a wider, pan-European process directed towards the introduction of systematic educational activities with the aim of ensuring that academia, medicine, and industry throughout Europe have a workforce that is appropriately equipped to meet the possibilities offered by this new and important discipline.
Getting involved in VPH Training activities
6-8 September 2010, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona
Background
The purpose of the VPH NoE Workshop is three-fold:
- To interact with the VPH community and foster communications and involvement
- To introduce the VPH NoE ToolKit as a concept to potential users
- To provide practical solutions to specific image processing problems
Workshop Format
Experts will be on hand over the three days of the Workshop to tackle problems raised by members of the VPH community. It is expected that the experts will spend two days on each problem, defining the issues, exploring alternatives, selecting the most promising approach and then optimising the solution, meaning that some problems will be examined over Mon/Tue 6/7 Sept and others over Tue/Wed 7/8.
Where the problem-posing groups are present in Barcelona they will be expected to participate to the fullest extent of their knowledge and capabilities in the problem-solving process and, where relevant, to join in the establishment of the criteria for good performance and in the activities required to optimise the solutions.
Each day will begin with an introduction to the day’s activities, followed by talks from image-processing experts. The main problem-solving work will then occupy the remainder of each day.
Visitors will be invited to spend the final two hours of their visit assembling a PowerPoint presentation that describes each aspect of the process they have experienced, including a description of the problem, the solutions considered and employed, the optimisation process and finally examples of the outputs.
Problems to be tackle during the workshop
- Wall segmentation in abdominal aortic aneurysm
- Visualization of myocardial strain tensor over time
- Personalized assessment of CRT Lead placement in the coronaries
- Personalization of template surface mesh and volumetric mesh
- The segmentation of the aortic root using MR/CT images
- Aneurysm and vascular tree reconstruction
- Blood vessel segmentation algorithm validation
- Ultrasound and optical imaging joint visualisation
Participants
Experts
- Benoit Bleuze (INRIA)
- Frederic Cervenansky (Creatis)
- Eduardo Davila (Creatis)
- Chiara Riccobene (Cilab)
- Xavier Planes (Cilab)
- Yves Martelli (Cilab)
Problem Person
- Peter Hoskins (University of Edinburgh)
- Barry Doyle (University of Limerick, comes with Peter)
- Jeroen Hamers (Hemolab)
- Mathieu De Craene (Cilab)
- Daniel Romero (Cilab)
- Corné Hoogendoorn (Cilab)
2nd. VPH NoE Study Group
October 4th-8th 2010
a networking activity in parallel with the Second Barcelona School on Biomedical Informatics (BSBMI’10)
Host Institutions
The second VPH NoE study group will be held in Barcelona in October 2010. The event will be carried out in conjunction with the second Barcelona School of Biomedical Informatics (BSBMI’10). The event, hosted by the IMIM Hospital del Mar (IMIM), the Barcelona Biomedical Research Park (PRBB) and the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), will take place in the outstanding premises of the PRBB, located next to the beachfront in Barcelona. For further informacion please follow here
Objective
The 2nd VPH NoE Study Group will include the presentation of new developments on the field of multiscale simulations. The event will consist on a one day workshop on multiscale simulations, followed by four days of actual study group on applying such concepts and methods to three different biomedical problems. In the line of the first study group, hosted by the University of Notingham, the event will focus more on problem definition than on the use of actual tools, although in this edition some of the tools identified by the VPH community in the form of the VPH toolkit will be explained in some details to make participants aware of existing solutions to common problems. The study group and BSBMI is aimed at both Graduate Students and Research Scientists working in the field of multiscale simulations in biomedicine, and will bring together experts from both the public and private sectors.
The study group and BSBMI will have a focus on multiscalability, its computational aspects and, in particular, its relationship with translational research in biomedicine.
Format
The event will include a one day workshop dealing with general aspects of the mathematics and physics behind multiscale simulations as well as the definition of the biological problems to be tackled in the rest of the week. Thus, a combination of lectures and tutorials will be given during the rest of the week, followed by extensive work in groups to develop “solutions” to the proposed biomedical questions.
The participants will be expected to present a brief summary of their methodology and findings in several sessions on the final day of the event. While each day will have a different central theme, it is anticipated that there will be synergistic overlap between these themes.
Getting involved in VPH Training activities - 1st VPH NoE study group
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The Centre for Mathematical Medicine and Biology (CMMB) at the University of Nottingham is organising the 1st VPH NoE study group, to take place in Nottingham (June 29 - July 3, 2009) as part of the interdisciplinary/integrative training activities of this network. |
Mathematics in medicine study groups are workshops for interaction between mathematicians and academic and industrial experimentalists working within the life sciences. Researchers from experimental and industrial laboratories are invited to present technical problems for study in working sessions with leading mathematicians from the academic community. Problems may come from a variety of subject areas, but should be amenable to mathematical modelling and analysis. In a week of brainstorming and mathematical modelling there is usually enough time to generate and assess many ideas for solving the problem. These meetings are attended by postgraduates and postdoctoral fellows as well as faculty members, and are hence an excellent activity for both early stage and well established researchers.
The theme of this study group is regenerative medicine with a focus on epithelial cells across different organs. On the first day of the week five (already selected) different problems will be presented from experimentalists. Groups comprised of theoretical modellers and experimentalists will spend the rest of the week tackling the particular problem.
The long-term goal of these study groups is to stimulate ideas and lead to further research and collaborations. The most common types of follow-up activities are i) follow up meetings on problems which had a promising start, ii) research output which lead to either publications or clinical/industrial uptake, iii) ongoing collaborations and grant proposals for funding for further work. Further details are available here.
To view a video made on the last VPH study group held in Nottingham 2009 please visit Youtube 'Biology meets mathematics'. There are currently over 7,000 hits!
Thank you for your interest. Registration has now closed
Virtual Physiological Human Scientists (VPH-MIP)
This newly funded project under the Lifelong Learning Programme, Curriculum Development will start in October. The general main objectives of this project are to:
Identify VPH-relevant modules offered in graduate programmes within participating institutions, and develop alignments to enable students at one institution to take related but complementary modules at a second institution.
Design extensibility principles by which additional institutions could participate in this programme in the future, considering complementarily to partners, and ensuring mobility of students and staff.
Identify gaps in current provision and develop exemplar VPH Core Modules as on-line resources that can be followed by all students participating in the programme, and which will become the backbone of training in this field.
Do so in a manner that is compatible with educational systems throughout the EU.
Address legal, administrative, and political issues required to facilitate mobility.
VPH NoE Repository
Please note that WP4 related documents and a private WP4 workspace is now available in the VPH NoE repository. To go to the VPH repository please click here.
VPH NoE Workshop on Toolkit Hands-on Training
6-8 September 2010, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona
Background
The purpose of the VPH NoE Workshop is three-fold:
· To interact with the VPH community and foster communications and involvement
· To introduce the VPH NoE ToolKit as a concept to potential users
· To provide practical solutions to specific image processing problems
Workshop Format
Experts will be on hand over the three days of the Workshop to tackle problems raised by members of the VPH community. It is expected that the experts will spend two days on each problem, defining the issues, exploring alternatives, selecting the most promising approach and then optimising the solution, meaning that some problems will be examined over Mon/Tue 6/7 Sept and others over Tue/Wed 7/8.
Where the problem-posing groups are present in Barcelona they will be expected to participate to the fullest extent of their knowledge and capabilities in the problem-solving process and, where relevant, to join in the establishment of the criteria for good performance and in the activities required to optimise the solutions.
Each day will begin with an introduction to the day’s activities, followed by talks from image-processing experts. The main problem-solving work will then occupy the remainder of each day.
Visitors will be invited to spend the final two hours of their visit assembling a PowerPoint presentation that describes each aspect of the process they have experienced, including a description of the problem, the solutions considered and employed, the optimisation process and finally examples of the outputs.
Problems to be tackle during the workshop
1. Wall segmentation in abdominal aortic aneurysm
2. Visualization of myocardial strain tensor over time
3. Personalized assessment of CRT Lead placement in the coronaries
4. Personalization of template surface mesh and volumetric mesh
5. The segmentation of the aortic root using MR/CT images
6. Aneurysm and vascular tree reconstruction
7. Blood vessel segmentation algorithm validation
8. Ultrasound and optical imaging joint visualisation
Participants
Experts
- Benoit Bleuze (INRIA)
- Frederic Cervenansky (Creatis)
- Eduardo Davila (Creatis)
- Chiara Riccobene (Cilab)
- Xavier Planes (Cilab)
- Yves Martelli (Cilab)
Problem Person
- Peter Hoskins (University of Edinburgh)
- Barry Doyle (University of Limerick, comes with Peter)
- Jeroen Hamers (Hemolab)
- Mathieu De Craene (Cilab)
- Daniel Romero (Cilab)
- Corné Hoogendoorn (Cilab)