ESO GAINS WSO Early Career Virtual Training Workshop

21 Dec 2021

The third Early Career Investigators Virtual Training Workshop was held this year 3rd and 4th of December. This workshop is the culmination of a collaboration between the European Stroke Organization, GAINS, and the World Stroke Organisation. Our goal is to connect early career investigators in stroke with each other, and with experienced mentors from across the globe.

This year 200 early career researchers, from 48 different countries, registered for the event. More than half were women, all were within 10 years of their first academic post and while some were just starting out, others were well in the throes of doing research in their country.

Our program mixes educational short talks about getting started, as well inspiring short talks sharing lessons learnt from experienced researchers from a range of disciplines, with live moderated sessions that showcase the relationship between a mentor and a mentee, and live mentor facilitated sessions to tackle career advice and research project mentoring. We thank the 35 mentors who gave their time to support this event! All of the presentations, including our Mentor/Mentee showcases will be available on the WSO website soon. Go take a look.

This year we had two Mentor/Mentee showcases: On day one, Else Sandset led a Q & A with Charlotte Cardonnier and Didier Leys who have worked together so effectively over many years. Our second Mentor/Mentee showcase was with Peter Sandercock and Erik Lundstrom, moderated by Diana de Sousa. This showcase addressed remote mentoring, where the mentor and mentee don’t work in the same institute or the same country! Some truly wonderful insights into what makes these relationships successful can be seen in the videos, so do check them out.

We hope to run this great event again in 2022. There is a clear need for young stroke researchers to build their networks and get support. With our partners, the WSO hopes to continue to grow the next generation of researchers in stroke.

Julie Bernhardt

Convenor, WSO Research Committee Co-Chair

On behalf of the Organising Committee

Alastair Webb, Dar Dowlatshahi, Else Sandset, Andrew Demchuk, Diana de Sousa, Ye Liu