– Written by John Salter, EMEA Director
And so another EU Connect closes. Our first major face-to-face event in Europe since 2019 was a resounding success, with over 600 attendees sharing their knowledge and dusting off their networking skills in the beautiful city of Belfast. As is now commonplace with the PHUSE Board, we take the opportunity to have a full-day meeting to review our past successes and plan for the future. For context, we meet as a Board on a monthly (virtual) basis to ensure that PHUSE is still delivering on our core mission – to share ideas to enhance the life sciences community – as well as keeping on top of the latest news and technological advances to meet the needs of our membership. However, as I’m sure you will agree, face-to-face meetings have greater weight and give us the opportunity to put in place strategic goals for the years to come.
We began – as always – with a brief overview of the conference itself, with a roundtable SWOT discussion to see what successes we can build upon as well as things we could manage better. Having run these events for nearly 20 years now (just typing that makes me feel old), as confident as we are in our provision of a quality conference, we are happy to admit where things didn’t work so well … watch this space for developments!
We also took the time to review our PHUSE Go Green credentials – from reducing paper wastage through the PHUSE App to siting future conference venues to limit the carbon footprint/offset accordingly. We will be looking to set up a small taskforce to review this on a regular basis, so if you wish to get involved, please let us know via the website.
We are also looking at increasing the visibility of our PHUSE Education offering, and as such will be looking for volunteers to help contribute to its growth and curation. As we have seen through our Single Day Events and both Connects, open-source sharing is now a keystone of the industry and we are actively collaborating with other organisations, but we need to capitalise on our strengths in order to keep the momentum. We also discussed opportunities for areas where PHUSE can increase our engagement, and new areas for supporting all clinical data scientists.
One final piece of news involves a change to the Board – we said goodbye to Yvonne Moores after ten years on the Board, starting as EU Membership Director before moving to Special Projects in 2018. She started working with PHUSE back in 2006 and was our Conference Chair in Brighton in 2011. Her drive and enthusiasm have been a key part of PHUSE and she will be sorely missed.
To mitigate the loss, I am happy to introduce our new Special Projects Director, Lynn Clipstone.
Lynn has been involved with PHUSE since 2012, when she first chaired the Professional Development Stream. In 2017/2018, she led the PHUSE Working Group which developed the job description for a clinical data scientist.
As a further introduction to Lynn – and apologies to The Times Weekend magazine for plagiarism – here are some quick-fire questions and answers:
Theatre or cinema? Cinema
Dress up or dress down? Dress down
Full English or continental? Continental, but a full English once in a while is nice.
Signature dish? Lasagne – or so my 15 year old tells me!
I couldn’t get through the weekend without… Time with family and friends. Weekends are for chilling and disconnecting from work – you’ve got to have balance!
We are also pleased to announce that Chris Hurley will be continuing his role as Americas Director on the Board.
Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to thank all our contributors, sponsors and members for their continued support of PHUSE – we are a volunteer-driven organisation and could not do what we do without your valuable input. We look forward to working with you all throughout 2023 and the years to come.