Share your ideas and experiences in the EACR’s online magazine, The Cancer Researcher
With many parts of the world on lockdown and/or working from home due to COVID-19, the cancer research community is reacting and adapting. Even if we can’t meet in person there is a great deal we can learn from each other.
We’d like to help by sharing ideas and best practice for how to cope in these new and unfamiliar circumstances, so we are inviting EACR members to contribute a blog post on your experiences for The Cancer Researcher.
Our President, Alberto Bardelli, has written a moving article in Nature about his experience shutting down his lab in Northern Italy: Coronavirus lockdown: What I learnt when I shut my cancer lab in 48 hours.
For example, you could write about some of the below ideas:
- Adjusting from working in the lab to working at home: What are you and your lab doing to make this transition easier? How are lab meetings working? Are you following a new daily routine? What about key deadlines? What advice do you offer others in the same position?
- Experiments: Did you have to abandon your experiments? Have you changed your outcomes? Are your experiments able to continue? What could the repercussions be? What advice do you have for others with experiments they may have to postpone/change?
- Mental health/work-life balance: What are you doing to preserve your mental health? What advice do you have for others? How are you unwinding? If you’re a parent, how are you balancing looking after your children with keeping on top of your work?
- Teaching/studying: How are you teaching or studying from home? Is it easy? Are you enjoying doing it this way? What’s your communication with students/teachers like?
- Recommendations: Are there any online resources that you’ve found helpful, either to help you continue your work, or to stay in touch with others? Or maybe you’d like to offer some recommendations of books/podcasts/music/TV shows that other EACR members may enjoy?
- Making a contribution: Maybe you or your colleagues have transferred your time and expertise to volunteer in a COVID-19 testing hub, or on modelling the virus spread?
No time to write a complete article? We are also compiling a list of useful online resources for researchers who can’t get to the lab, so please send us any tools, websites, free webinars or anything else that you would recommend.
GUIDELINES
When you write for The Cancer Researcher, these guidelines are what we believe make the ideal article/blog:
- Ideally an article will be 450-750 words in length
- Include your name, job title, institute/affiliation, and a short 50-75 word summary about yourself and your research
- We welcome articles written jointly by several lab members
- You’re more than welcome to submit something you’ve already posted elsewhere as long as it’s acknowledged
- Please send your article as a Microsoft Word file
- Please add up to 3 or 4 high quality photographs (GIFs are also welcome) – including a photo of yourself! (Send separately from the Word file and make sure they comply with copyright)
- Provide links to your social media so people can interact with you about your article
- Put your personality into it – we love it when people’s passion shows in their writing
Please submit your articles to ben.garrett@eacr.org.
