Andrea Gargano
Tenure track Assistant Professor, van’t Hoff Institute for Molecular Science, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Fears? I fear that the opportunities we have to expose our research are insufficient to disseminate our results and interact with other scientific communities. I fear that we are not doing enough to bridge the analytical community with other applied and fundamental sciences. Analytical science research groups should not be an ensemble of research islands focused on developing complex methods. Ideally, we should be organic/integrated parts of institutes, universities, and international research efforts. However, for young academics like me, it is not common to be part of international research efforts, to be involved in research that crosses disciplines, or even to teach in a different context than the one in which they work. I think analytical science needs to grow even more into a more multidisciplinary and broader community rather than following a spiral of hyper-specialization.
Dream dinner party? My dream analytical science dinner would be themed “prospectives on how to perform and monitor gene therapy.” Presentations and dinner would alternate. The event would have an open bar with good cocktails to facilitate interactions. Jennifer Douna would be introducing and giving her perspective on gene therapy approaches. Kelly Zhang would tell us about how therapeutics have been developed and the challenges in their analysis, and Carol Robinson would give her perspective on what mass spectrometry can do in facilitating the understanding of the modifications that gene therapy induces in living organisms.
The dinner would be with fun friends from our community and family. Some of them that come to mind are: Peter Schoenmakers, Rob Haselberg, Isabelle Kohler, Henrik Cornelisson van de Veen, Eva Johansson, but many more should be there, including our students. They would help manage the dinner, ask questions, and make it a captivating and fun event. The outcome of such an event would certainly be a successful research grant!
