The annual meeting organised by CQE – “CQE Days”, took place online, on 28th and 29th May. 166 people registered for the event. The number of participants in Zoom sessions was high. The programme was divided into 12 sessions that addressed topics related to the excellent work carried out at CQE.
39% of registered participants came from the Faculty of Sciences – Universidade de Lisboa and 61% from Técnico community, including CTN researchers. According to the event organisers, the balance of this year’s edition “is quite positive”. “Although Twitter is still relatively recent for such activities, members from all CQE units have participated in the meeting, including members from other centres and countries, in particular Spain, Italy and Chile”, says Gonçalo Justino, CQE researcher. “If the meeting was held as usual, we would probably not have so many participants. We were very pleased to welcome many of our colleagues, researchers and professors via Twitter and Zoom”.
The programme was adapted to online format: shorter sessions at more frequent intervals. “We organised three sessions (40-minutes each) in the morning and afternoon, on each day, which included four presentations (5 minutes each)”, says Gonçalo Justino. “This made the whole event more dynamic, which is even more relevant online”, he adds.
116 works were shared on Twitter, of which 47 were selected for brief presentations on Zoom. On average, each session managed to captivate 80 participants. Among the works in the competition, the researcher Pedro Pinheiro won 1st place for his work “Triggering a specific immune response against cancer by activating Natural Killer cells with a small organic molecule”, and researcher Patrícia Pereira won 2nd place for her work “Can cartoons control diameters?”. The work titled “Construction of a specific immunosensing nanostructured interface”, authored by the researcher Rui Correia, ranked 3rd. The most tweeted work during the event was “Smart coating incorporated with pH sensitive carriers loaded inhibitors for smarter future!”, authored by the researcher Roma Raj.
In the future, the event will take place in face-to-face format but will maintain a strong digital component at the same time. “We believe that this will increase the number of participants, as it will allow those who cannot stop their work to follow the event online”, says the researcher. According to Gonçalo Justino, the digital format will also “allow to involve researchers from other centres and other regions more easily, thus contributing to the dissemination of CQE activities and to establish broad collaborations”.
