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How to make labs more sustainable: introducing sustainability in academia

9 December 2024

by Jeroen Dobbelaere

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.

How to make labs more sustainable: about the author Jeroen Dobbelaere

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.

One year review: the present and future of organising sustainable academic events

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.

JCS Journal Meeting 2024: Diversity and Evolution in Cell Biology in Spain

16 September 2024

Group photo of attendees for the 2024 JCS meeting.

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.

The Forest of Biologists shortlisted for ALPSP Impact Award 2024

28 June 2024

Screenshot of The Forest of Biologists website, highlighting a tree planted for an article published in JCS

We are very proud that The Forest of Biologists has been shortlisted for the ALPSP Impact Award 2024. This is a great recognition for a project that we have thoroughly enjoyed launching and that we feel makes a true impact to both the scientific community and the natural environment.

Ryan Harrison recounts his professional internship at The Company of Biologists

5 December 2024

Four employees standing in front of the "supporting biologists inspiring biology." tagline.
Ryan Harrison (second from the left) amongst the Community Managers.

 

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.

The Company of Biologists embraces Publication Integrity Week

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.

The Company of Biologists celebrates postdocs

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.

Get an inside look into a successful, sustainable conference

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.

Inaugural Global South Workshop is held in South Africa

17 June 2024

We were delighted to host our inaugural Global South Workshop, organised by Kênia Bícego (São Paulo State University, Brazil) and Andrea Fuller (University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa) and held at Kruger National Park, South Africa in March 2024. Our Global South Workshop is part of our ongoing commitment to diversifying our Workshop programme so that we can support a wider selection of research communities around the world.

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