Thursday 29 December 2016

Mid-Term Review Meeting in Dublin, Ireland


Hi guys!!

How have you been during this month? Hopefully, all of you had a wonderful Christmas and spent some quality time with your family and friends.


As we get closer to the end of 2016, I take advantage to write here about an important meeting that our TRUSS research group had at the beginning of this month, on the 1st and 2nd of December in Dublin, Ireland.

I'm talking about the Mid-Term Review (MTR) meeting that had the goal of bringing together all the ESR's, supervisors, representatives of partner organizations and project coordinator with a project officer from the Research Executive Agency (REA) and a scientific external expert. This MTR had the goal of assessing the fulfillment of the scientific, training, management and networking aspects that are part of the grant agreement that serves as the basis of this current European research project. Hence, not only the scientific progress was to be evaluated but also particular attention was to be given to the training activities and networking aspects including the topic of each ESR's secondment.

(Credits)

This meeting was held in the offices of Ove Arup and Partners, one of the global leading firms of structural design engineering.

Ove Arup & Partners offices in Dublin, Ireland (credits)

After an initial introduction of all the attendees,  the Project Coordinator, Prof. Arturo Gonzalez made an interesting presentation about the TRUSS project and its current situation. From this, I want to point out the information provided regarding the local training on complimentary skills received by the ESRs: "314 hours in 8 language courses, more than 110 hours in teaching activities -supervising, demonstrating or providing tutorials- and more than 150 hours in other taught courses on soft skills -bibliographical management, how to write an academic paper, communication skills, etc-." Furthermore, regarding more technical skills, the ESR's received "more than 500 hours in 19 laboratory/field tests and almost 1000 hours in 71 courses directly related to their research while also attending 37 conferences"

Moreover, details with reference to the already carried out dissemination of the overall project were shared with all the attendees of this meeting: "TRUSS has published 24 technical papers (3 in peer-reviewed journals and 21 in conferences), and 3 press releases in mainstream magazines or newspapers prior to November 2016".

Finally, each ESR made a very brief and small presentation regarding their scientific progress, local and network-wide received training in these past 14 months.

Presenting at Mid-Term Review Meeting in Dublin, Ireland (credits)
In conclusion, this was an incredibly enjoyable meeting where it was possible to observe the general good situation of the project and the great work being carried out not only by each of the ESRs but also by every person involved in this research program.

In addition and on a great final note, I conclude this post by informing you that in little less than 3 weeks our group is going to get together again, this time in Barcelona, for the second network-wide training week. Therefore, in the next post, surely I will write here plenty of enjoyable stories about this meeting, so please stay tuned!

I wish you all a wonderful year of 2017!