What is Fellowship Assembly (FA)
The ALPACA fellowship assembly (FA) consists of all 14 ALPACA fellows across 13 institutes. It elects two representatives which join the Supervisory Board (SB) each year. The purpose of this assembly is boosting the communication between fellows, opening the possibility of further collaborations, promoting their team spirit, and organising social activities along the project. The FA gives suggestions for training workshops. It drives the social network activities and reports on any aspect of the European Training Network. The FA can also interact directly with the ALPACA Executive Committee if necessary.
The FA will meet regularly at least once a year preferably in Annual Workshops.
The First Meeting
The first Fellowship Assembly meeting took place on November 23, 2022 at 10:00. All ALPACA fellows (except for two) and the project manager joined an online meeting on Zoom. The proposed agenda for the meeting was as follows:
- Dissemination and website
- Review of activities of the last year
- Report about the last SB meeting by representatives
- Secondments
- Announcement of election process for new ESR representatives
- Flash presentations of current projects by all fellows
- Open discussion on how to increase interactions among fellows
The goal of the meeting was sharing ideas about possible collaboration, further communications between fellows, and giving feedback about events (past and
future). Ali, the project manager, clarified questions regarding dissemination of results, secondments, and accessing documents on the website which is recently introduced. Pio, as an ESR representative, reported back to FA about his participation in the last Supervisory Board meeting. The current representatives, Pio and Konstantinn, also called for new candidates for the next ESR representatives election.
Afterwards, there were flash presentations by participating fellows about their current research projects. The idea was to keep in touch with the works of others and keep finding common interests.
The meeting was wrapped up by an open discussion session about how to increase team spirit among fellows. The highlight of the discussion was designing ALPACA merchs; like t-shirt, mug, etc with a theme related to ALPACA or computational pangenomics.