16 January 2025
As part of Journal of Experimental Biology’s 100-year anniversary celebration in 2023, The Company of Biologists launched two new funding initiatives aimed at supporting junior faculty staff setting up their first laboratory and research group. This critical career stage is markedly challenging considering the few funding opportunities available. We recognise that junior faculty staff represent the future of the field and created these funding opportunities to continue to support the experimental biology community.
One of our 2024 grant awardees is Pauline Fleischmann from Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg, Germany. …
9 December 2024
With a growing interest in sustainability in academia, we need to help the biological community embrace these practices within their lab. This is the first of six posts in which I will focus on how to make labs more sustainable. This first post offers an overall picture of academia’s environmental impact. …
5 December 2024
We are very excited to welcome Jeroen Dobbelaere as a guest author for this important blog series on how to make our labs more sustainable. …
19 September 2024
My name is Teodora Rinciog and I am the Sustainable Conferencing and Communications Officer at The Company of Biologists. For the past year, I have been working on improving the sustainable strategy of our charitable Workshops and Journal Meetings, whilst also supporting biologists across the world organise their academic events in a more sustainable manner. In this blog, I would like to share with you what I have learnt in the past year about how to organise sustainable academic events and how this will change in the future. While climate change is a familiar term nowadays, it is still hard to imagine how this will tangibly affect our lives in the near future. We were born in the era of consumerism, and it is difficult to imagine that our children will live any differently to us. Yet, the UN has already announced that we could reach the critical 1.5 °C global warming threshold soon. Every action taken from now on counts. …
16 September 2024
The Journal Meeting, Diversity and Evolution in Cell Biology, organised by Journal of Cell Science (JCS) took place from 24 June to 27 June 2024 in Catalonia, Spain. The aim of this meeting was to bring together evolutionary biologists and cell biologists investigating diverse aspects of cellular physiology, traversing both spatial scales – from subcellular cytoskeletal dynamics to symbiotic interactions – and evolutionary time.
13 January 2025
Within research labs there are several recognisable appliances which use a considerable amount of energy. These appliances include freezers for storing samples, incubators for optimising growing conditions and ovens for sterilising equipment. Additionally, there are hidden energy-demanding sources, which may often go overlooked. Ventilation systems and accessories, including fume hoods, may use up to 35% of the energy use in a modern lab. The ventilation systems are there to protect the researchers by exchanging the air in the lab every 5 to 8 minutes and to provide perfect experimental conditions that allow for high reproducibility but uses high amounts of energy by constantly moving, heating/cooling and humidification of the air. In addition, operating systems such as computers and servers are required to be constantly on, adding to the energy footprint. …
5 December 2024
Ryan Harrison, a PhD student between the labs of Timothy Saunders and James Briscoe as part of the MRC DTP in Interdisciplinary Biomedical Research, recounts his recent internship experience with The Company of Biologists. …
19 November 2024
Publication Integrity Week 2024 takes place on 18-22 November 2024 and is hosted by the Committee of Publication Ethics (COPE). In line with our commitment to ethical publishing, The Company of Biologists is a member of several organisations dedicated to maintaining standards in publishing ethics, including COPE. This year’s Publication Integrity Week includes sessions on plagiarism, working together, the future of publication ethics, paper mills and dealing with data. At The Company of Biologists, we are always working to develop and improve our policies and practices to ensure our papers uphold high ethical standards, and to better serve the needs of our communities. …
17 September 2024
The daily contributions made by postdocs are essential in setting a positive work environment and progressing the science of each lab. Postdocs have a valuable impact on the biological community in general and they deserve recognition for their efforts. We believe that, as our future leaders in biology, it is vital to provide postdocs with the right support during these early stages of their academic career by helping to grow their network, providing access points to join the biological community, maximising the impact of their research and helping to raise their profile. As our relationship with postdocs grows, our postdocs have enriched The Company of Biologists community in a myriad of ways.
11 July 2024
It can be problematic to perfectly blend social, environmental and financial goals when organising an academic event, but we think that Chrissy Hammond (University of Bristol) and her co-organisers Lizzie Lawrence, Joanna Moss, Nikki Stevenson and Rabia Sevil rose to the challenge at The Dynamic matrix: mechanics, ageing and repair Conference, a British Society for Matrix Biology (BSMB) meeting. We were delighted to support this event from our Fund for Innovations in Sustainable Conferencing and Scientific Meeting Grants, and we are keen to continue supporting events like this in the future.
We are very grateful to Chrissy for welcoming us at this event. We had the opportunity to talk with the main stakeholders involved in the planning process and we would like to share with you some of the good practices they implemented whilst organising a green meeting. …
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