Ecraid Young Investigator Meeting at ECCMID 2023: This second edition,16^th April 2023, aimed to engage young investigators to participate in Ecraid to further develop their training, support their career path and engage them in research within a European clinical research network. 57 people attended in a hybrid session and participated actively. We all shared the struggles of running clinical research (long administrative procedures, planning the creation of a protocol, designing an efficient CRF, data management, sharing, analysis…) and the need to collaborate with more experienced people to go through them. As for last year, the main conclusion question was “How can we get in?”

Ana C. Hernandez (Ecraid Young Investigator meeting organiser and speaker)

Register here

The purpose of this year’s workshop is to share the struggles that we all go through when developing a research project: translating an idea into a protocol and a CRF; optimizing data collection and use for future analyses. During last year’s workshop, we exchanged some of these struggles with the participants, and showed some of the specific opportunities that Ecraid could offer to facilitate this work. This year, we wanted to go more in detail through these challenges and discuss over concrete examples of solutions we found within Ecraid, and the successful projects that came out of it. Compared to last year, we have increased the time planned for interactive discussions, to better address the participants needs within the workshop.

Young investigators are highly motivated to bring their research to a good conclusion, but may lack the experience on the difficulties they may encounter and thus the possible tools to resolve them. Within Ecraid we have the chance to work with experienced teams that have prepared solutions or are currently working on creating new ones. This workshop is interesting as it puts attendees and organizers at the same level and opens the stage for learning at both sides.

Better Methods for Clinical Studies in Infectious Diseases and Clinical Microbiology

20 - 22 October 2022, Utrecht, Netherlands

View the course programme flyer here

Registration closed

Event report

After the start of Ecraid-Base early 2021, and the official registration of the Ecraid foundation in January 2022, ECCMID 2022 was the perfect occasion to present this innovative project to the scientific world. This project is creating a clinical research infrastructure that aims to become self-sustainable and shape the future of infectious diseases research in Europe. As such, it is important to engage investigators at the start of their careers, and therefore we organized a young investigators meeting. There were 50 spots available, which were filled up well before the registration deadline. On Monday morning 9am on the third day of the conference, we were wondering whether people still had enough energy to show-up, but the room was already full upon our arrival. The meeting was hosted by Dr Alike van der Velden (UMCU Utrecht), Dr Fabiana Arieti (Verona University), Dr Ana C. Hernandez (CHU Limoges), and Dr Marlieke de Kraker (Geneva University Hospitals). After a welcome video of Marc Bonten, Marlieke presented the general concept of ECRAID, with a specific focus on the perpetual observational studies that are implemented within the infrastructure, Fabiana show-cased the role of the epidemiological workstream (EPI-Net) within ECRAID, followed by an explanation of the role of the statistical workstream (STAT-Net) by Marlieke. After which a lively discussion was initiated, showing the engagement of the young investigators present, and their interest in participating in Ecraid and how Ecraid could help them in their first steps towards scientific research, whereby support for writing and submitting grants to obtain funding was one of the requests. In the second half of the session, Ana and Alike presented the implementation of two specific perpetual observational studies in the fields of ventilator associated pneumonia (VAP) and acute respiratory infections (ARI) respectively. They showed the different opportunities the POS provides for the implementation of more extensive observational or interventional studies. At the end of the session, the lively discussions continued until we were summoned to leave the room. It was great to engage with so many young people interested in Ecraid, we have a bright future ahead!

Marlieke de Kraker PhD