SSSTC Schweiz-China: Stepping Stone Symposium 20. Juni 2012

The Stepping Stone Symposia are instruments under the Sino Swiss Science and Technology Cooperation (SSSTC) for promoting academic and industrial participation of the program: First conference on Cancer Research (CR) and Neurodegenerative Diseases (NDD) (SSS-CR/NDD)


Meeting Date: June 20th-22nd, 2012
Location: ETH Zurich, Switzerland

Although there are no calls for proposals planned for 2012— the new calls will have to wait until the budget decision for 2013-2016 is made, the SSSTC is not going into hibernation in 2012. On the contrary, in preparation for the next phase SSSTC, the program office is now organizing a number of Stepping Stone Symposia. Throughout the past three years, the SSSTC team has come to notice that, when it comes to research cooperation with China, synergistic effect may be created  through a “Swiss platform” in certain research fields. These platforms should include both academics and enterprises for the reason of increasing name recognition and Swiss competitiveness and innovation. We have therefore designed the Stepping Stone Symposia to bring industries and universities together with potential Chinese partners, with the goal of encouraging the formation of such platforms. In the best case scenario, these symposia should be sets of two symposia per topic: The first one should take place in Switzerland in order to lower the barrier for potential Swiss stakeholders to explore the possibility of an involvement in China. The second one would take place in China, about one year after the first one, so that the Swiss researchers/companies would have a chance to experience and understand the Chinese system firsthand.

After close to one year of preparation, I am glad to announce that we are now launching a Call for Abstracts for our first Stepping Stone Symposium on cancer research and neurodegenerative diseases. As of now, two major pharmaceutical companies* (others are still under negotiation) have confirmed their support for this symposium, which is essential in ensuring that translational research will be a focus of this symposium.

Further Information:

Schlagwörter: SSSTC


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