UK VVN Careers Workshop, 27 October 2015, Moredun Research Institute, Edinburgh
The BBSRC UK Veterinary Vaccinology Network held a workshop at Moredun Research Institute on 27 October 2015 for early-career scientists in veterinary vaccinology. The workshop was attended by 19 delegates from a variety of organisations from all over the UK. The event evolved from feedback from the first BBSRC UK Veterinary Vaccinology Conference in Birmingham in February, where a gap was identified in training specifically geared towards veterinary vaccinology. The programme of the workshop reflected this, with presentations and discussions on grant writing, funding opportunities, career development and the practical aspects of veterinary vaccines to meet the needs of the agricultural industry.
The workshop opened with a presentation by Tom Wileman (University of East Anglia) giving his perspective on the fundamental 'do's and don'ts' of grant writing. Tom has been a long-standing Introducing Member on BBSRC Committees and has extensive experience of the grant review process. He emphasised the importance of clarity, making sure that the research plan addresses the hypothesis and aims, and ensuring that the impact plan is specifically related to the research activities of the grant application. Tom also produced a short prototype grant application for the delegates to work on together to help them recognise the strengths and weaknesses of grant applications. His talk was complemented by presentations by Alexandra Spittle (BBSRC) and Matt Thakur (Wellcome) who gave the funders perspective on grant applications. They highlighted the funding streams that are targeted towards early-career researchers and how these can serve as platforms for career development towards being an independent Principal Investigator.
Willie Donachie (Moredun) talked about his career from his first degree, through his PhD as part of his employment and the identification iron-regulated proteins as potential vaccine candidates to protect against bacterial pneumonia in ruminants. Willie discussed the importance and challenges of protecting intellectual property when commercialising a prototype vaccine and explained how external factors that are outwith the control of researchers can create unforeseen hurdles. Jennie Batt (Larkmead Veterinary Practice) gave the final presentation of the day, describing her experiences of vaccination to improve productivity in pig farming. Jennie identified the key factors that she perceived to be important for new vaccines that will be fit for purpose. These were not specific to pig farming but have broad relevance for veterinary vaccinology, namely to reduce the regulations on combination vaccines, to support research into the refinement of delivery methods, to identify protective antigenic components for the disease in questions and to create gene-deleted vaccines that allow discrimination between infected and vaccinated animals (DIVA). She also highlighted the practical and economic aspects of vaccines and how these are equally as important as basic scientific elements to allow commercial adoption. This brought the presentations full circle from the grant writing to recognising stakeholder relevance and impact which are criteria by which funding applications are judged.
In addition to the presentations there was a Q&A session with Tom Wileman, Willie Donachie and Gary Entrican (Moredun and Member of the BBSRC UK Veterinary Vaccinology Steering Committee) on the factors that make a good grant application. There was also a speed-networking session where the delegates had the chance to interact with each other and make links that will hopefully translate to high-quality funding applications by the next generation of veterinary vaccinologists.
Presentations can be found within Vaccinology Resources