Monday, 30 December 2024

In Silico World is over; long live In Silico World

Five minutes ago, we uploaded the last contractual deliverable on the EC portal; tomorrow, the In Silico World project will come to its planned end after four years of intense activities.

This is, for me, an emotionally overloaded end for several reasons.  We started writing the ISW proposal in 2019 as I had just returned to Italy after seven years as Director of the Insigneo Institute for In Silico Medicine at the University of Sheffield, UK.  For the third time in my life, I was starting a research group from scratch, but I was also going back to full-time research after years of serving in a leadership position that left little time for my own research interests.  

I had put a lot of energy into the Avicenna support action and the relative research roadmap on In Silico Trials, and I was delighted that after a long gestation in 2018, the Avicenna Alliance was finally established to give all companies involved in this emerging sector the possibility to speak with one voice.  However, the Avicenna roadmap's vision was not becoming a reality, at least not with the speed we hoped. 

I had experience, time (as my new research group was slowly forming and my teaching had not started yet), and a clear goal in mind. The missing element arrived when the EC published, as part of the H2020 work programme, the call for proposal "SC1-DTH-06-2020: Accelerating the uptake of computer simulations for testing medicines and medical devices".  Leveraging on 30 years of networking, I quickly formed the core consortium, inviting only people I had already worked with in the past and that I trusted unconditionally. We got excellent scores from the reviewers, and we got funded.

It was a fantastic journey; ISW was the project of my maturity, everything came easy, and the management office I formed to help me run the project was excellent.  I am proud of our results; I genuinely believe that ISW has profoundly impacted the adoption of In Silico Trials in Europe, something not every EU-funded project can say.

This end is more emotionally loaded than the beginning.  The end of the ISW project overlaps with the end of my active research career; as I explained in another blog post, I will not apply for any further research funding and will focus the remainder of my career before retirement on teaching.  So, ISW will be my last EU-funded project.

As the first events to present FP10 are being announced, I cannot avoid returning with the memory to the end of FP4, when I got my first tiny EU grant funded. If I had a successful career, this is mainly due to the European Framework Program funding system, which allowed me to conduct independent research for over 30 years, even when my national environment would have made it impossible.  Having my own funding gave me the freedom I wanted if not a fast career progression (meritocracy has never been a thing in Italy). 

The European Union and its Framework Program funding system sustained my research, advanced my career, and allowed me to work and befriend amazing people all over Europe and, to a lesser extent, even abroad. It forced me to structure my scientific curiosities into a vision I pursued relentlessly for 25 years or so. It exposed me to very different cultures, giving me a healthy relativism about the “right” way to conduct yourself.

So, thank you, European Union, with all my heart.  I am, and I will be until I live, a European Citizen.



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