The COMPARE Team Science Away Day was held on the 18th May 2018 at the Old Ikon Gallery in Digbeth - the creative quarter of Birmingham. The event was attended by over 40 early career researchers and technicians from COMPARE, in equal numbers from Birmingham and Nottingham. Abdullah Khan and Carl White began with a short presentation on their Team Science-funded grant. This was followed by a great talk by Prof Jason Swedlow (University of Dundee) on collaboration amongst imaging scientists.

We started the interactive part of the day with a speed networking exercise, which helped to break the ice as members had a limited time to find out an interesting fact about their partner before moving on to the next person. Delegates were then sorted into six teams and were tasked with creating a grant proposal in 30 minutes, utilising all team members and their respective skills. This ‘speed grant writing’ session was highly enjoyed by the delegates and we ended up with six fantastic proposals. These ranged from an outreach programme of science videos to the all-singing-all-dancing proposal for optogenetic CXCR4 receptors to be CRISPRed into cells (and then in vivo) and imaged with light-sheet microscopy. This activity really highlighted the breadth of expertise we have within COMPARE, and hopefully will get the wheels of ECR/technician collaborations turning.

After a good lunch the day progressed onto the second topic, discussing authorship. We were thrilled to have Elizabeth Moylan from COPE and Christine Mieck from Nature Communications, who gave very interesting talks on what it means to be an author. This progressed into a lively panel discussion on potential authorship issues, chaired by Dean Kavanagh, and featured Jason Swedlow, Elizabeth Moylan, Christine Mieck, Tim Self and Steve Watson. Delegates were then split into different groups again and were tasked with critiquing a different guideline to authorship, ranging from the NIH and ICMJE guidelines, to guidelines offered by the Universities of Birmingham and Manchester. Responses from these groups was gathered and over the coming months we will collate these into a COMPARE specific guideline on authorship which will be in keeping with the Team Science approach.

We finished the day with a trip to a local brewery where the discussions continued until the Nottingham delegates had to leave for their bus trip home. We’d like to thank the panel members again, and also thank Chris, Sally and Sharmaine for helping with the organisation and ensuring everything ran smoothly on the day.

Details of future away days will be listed on the Forthcoming Events page.

Team Science Committee - Leigh Stoddart, Abdullah Khan, Victoria Sims, Mark Soave, Joelle Goulding, Carl White, Dee Kavanagh