After two years of restriction and no face-to-face meetings, we put all our hopes in the 3rd CANDY General Assembly Meeting ito finally meet in Nijmegen. The Hotel was chosen, the meeting room booked, however beginning of February we had to take the decision to – again – turn the face-to-face meeting into a full virtual one.
Despite of this, everyone made the best out of the situation and in the end we had a very nice fully packed, highly interesting 1 1/2 day virtual CANDY meeting.
On Thursday, 3rd of March Jan Buitelaar, the Coordinator of CANDY, welcomed everyone and gave a short project presentation about where we stand, what is upcoming next and the overall impact of the CANDY project. After this introduction the Work Package leader presented the progress, success stories and challenges within their work package. Lively discussion and sharing of best practices and lessons learned followed the presentations.
After this full schedule of scientific updates, the consortium met in our social event to have a virtual drink and some good discussion beyond science and research. Lucas Noldus kindly offered the Noldus company virtual space – Spatial Chat. We organized an entertaining quiz called “Know your project partner”, for which everyone who wanted to participate could send 3 habits, of which 2 were false and the audience needed to guess which one is the correct one. With this we ended the first meeting day.
On the second day, we started with the work packages of Dissemination, Ethics and Project Management, following two parallel breakout sessions – for the pre-clinical and clinical researchers. Afterwards the Scientific and Ethics Advisory Board meetings took place and they presented their feedback to the entire consortium afterwards.
With this positive and constructive feedback with good recommendations, we completed the 3rd CANDY General Assembly Meeting and Jan thank everyone for their lively interaction and enthusiasm towards our project.
We would like to THANK everyone, who joined and contributed to this successful CANDY Meeting