EPIBOOST 1st Advisory Board meeting

on the 27th of October 2023, online

It was about one month after the first annual meeting of the project that the EPIBOOST External Advisory Board (EAB), composed currently by Drs. Csaba Komlo, Eduarda Santos, Jan Mennigen and You Song, met with the project management team to provide recommendations that can improve the implementation of research and capacitation activities. The meeting lasted for one and a half hours and followed a pre-agreed agenda: 1) Welcome and brief summary presentation of the project; 2) Collection of general and specific opinions of the EAB members on the project and its progress; 3) Collection of suggestions from the EAB members to improve on the excellence, impact and implementation of the project.
Video records and the presentations used in the EPIBOOST annual meeting were provided to the EAB as resources for the preparation of the present meeting, a strategy that the EAB found very useful considering the difficulties in ensuring full attendance to meetings associated with different time zones and busy professional schedules.
The EAB found the project interesting and well-designed, recognising as well the funding limitations for research. was is unanimous that the project is progressing adequately. There are some minor aspects suffering from unexpected delays, but the measures placed to mitigate these delays were found appropriate. The close communication and synergies established among the Partners as well as the flexible management of exchanges were recognised as good strategies to comply with these shortcomings and successfully overcome delays.
The brainstorming allowed was found a great asset that can leverage the chances of successfully reaching more funding through a mature and deeply reasoned application to an appropriate large-scale call. The use of EPIBOOST as the ground generating background information for future ambitious projects covering critical aspects (standardization, high-throughput, long-term effects, etc.) in the field of environmental epigenetics was recognised as a great opportunity.
A number of suggestions were made by the EAB for implementation in the short and the long-term that we are and will be following!