Please download the minutes of the MC & CG meetings Paris 2011

        WG Meeting  Invited lecture:  Integrating AFM into the biomedical toolbox: Experiences, challenges, and opportunities

                                              Sanjay Kumar (UC Berkeley, CA, USA)  

Minutes from the MC meeting in Paris on Tuesday August 23, 2011

Magdalena presented problems with the following non-finalized MC member:   Michal Wozniak, Arto Urtti, Suzanne Jarvis,  Jean-Luc Pellequer

The Action should ask for the remaining 35% of the annual budget. It was reminded that the Intermediate Financial Report includes the forecast for the coming events in Year 1.

It was reminded that the deadline for the Annual Report Year 1 is 31/01/2012.

It was reminded that STSM must be terminated by the end of the current year (31/12/2011). The maximum amount of funding per STSM is 2500€ for max 3 months.

It was reminded that non-COST countries can join the Action. This is done at the Institute level and not at the country level. The procedure is to send a request to Magdalena (COST office) because it needs to be validated by the Domain Committee. It was emphasized not to do such a request for a single STSM.

During the MC meeting the following voting was performed:

     For STSM, the age requirement is set at PhD + 10 years: accepted unanimously.

    For 2012, two meetings are foreseen: 1 WG meeting + 1MC/WG meeting: accepted unanimously.

    For 2012, the next WG meeting will be held at Linz during the Linz Workshop on Feb 3: accepted unanimously. It was suggested that a COST session is organized  on

Feb 4 in conjunction with the Linz workshop; this should give the opportunity for non-MC members to join the COST Action.

• It was decided to create a new working tool by introducing projects. A project aims to prepare grants targeting financial support from FP7. Each project requires a coordinator and is open to everyone. Any project should be associated with at least one Working Group and involve at least one Woking Group leader. This concept was unanimously accepted. The first project: cellular mechanics was created. The coordinators are: Drs. M. Radmacher and F. Lafont.
• The budget for 2012 proposed as followed was unanimously accepted:

Meetings 2012: 65,000 €

Short Term Scientific Missions: 20,000 € (8*2500 €)

Training school: 14,100 €

Dissemination: 4,000 €

OERSA: 500 €

FSAC: 9,000 € (8%, max 15%)

 A new country (Turkey) is asking to join the Action. Because the Action started more than a year, a MC voting is required. An email will be send to every MC member for approval/rejection. It was decided that absence of response will be considered as an implicit approval.

 The location for the second MC/WG meeting in 2012 could not be decided at this time. Complementary information is required from volunteers to make the destination the most practical ones. The following destinations were suggested:

            Viterbo (S. Cannistraro),  Cracow (M.Lekka),  Cambridge (R. Henderson), Zagreb (A. Hozic)

Important Reminder: Expenses are funded on the principle of the most economical overall expenditure.  If they are willing to participate, Members should book their travels as soon as they receive an invitation from the Grant Holder. 

Minutes from the Core Group meeting in Paris on Monday August 23, 2011

It should be reminded that there are practical goals in our Action. The COST Action provides support fir the interaction of members and other researchers on the topic of AFM in nanomedicine and biological sciences. A successful COST Action is expected to obtain research papers (or reviews) with multiple laboratories belonging to the Action (even better if they never had collaborative papers previously). But any other outcome from discussions at COST meetings should be acknowledge and accounted for. Here is a non-exclusive list of quantitative achievements, when appropriate:

 1- Acknowledge the COST Action in papers related to the topic of the Action using the following sentence: “Some/The content of this work was inspired by discussions from the COST Action TD1002”

2- Display the COST Action TD1002 logo for lectures/seminars/conferences on topics related to that of the Action

3- Count how many speakers from clinical research were invited in AFM-research laboratory and how many AFM researchers were invited to clinical research laboratory

4- Add the COST Action logo on poster in conferences

5- Count interactions between COST-involved researchers and public bodies on topics related to the Action.

6- Count interactions with EU SMEs/industries

7- Anticipate the writing of scientific review about the state of art within each WG. High-impact journal should be targeted for higher visibility.