Candidate for ISAC councilor

I am candidate as ISAC councilor. The elections are in the next few weeks (vote end by March the 30th). Are you an ISAC memeber? Please, vote. All the instructions on how to vote will be soon linked here. Not an ISAC member? Do you want to know more about ISAC? Please, click here to know more about the the International Society for Advancement of Cytometry. Below, there are a few notes on my biography and thoughts about the society. Biography Born in Latina (Italy), I performed both my undergraduate (Biological Sciences, summa cum laude, 1995) and graduate studies (Doctoral degree in Cell Science and Morphogenesis, top mention, 2000) at the Sapienza University of Rome. Since then I accumulated a quite varied experience abroad, as a visiting scholar at the Stanford University (Stanford, CA; 1999), then as a postdoctoral fellow at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine (New York, NY; 2000-2003), as invited researcher at the Myology Group, UMR S 787 Inserm, UPMC (Paris, FR; 2007), where I ultimately returned in 2010 as a Maitre de Conferences, i.e. assistant professor, at the University Paris VI/Pierre et Marie Curie. I also held in Italy the responsibility of the Laboratory of Electron Microscopy and Calcium Imaging (Rome, IT; 2004-2010). All this was a lot of fun, since I could feed myself with great science - not to mention outstanding culinary experiences - from very different environments. For all the above, I have to acknowledge several mentors, including Laura Teodori and Sergio Adamo in Rome, Marco Conti in Stanford and David Sassoon in New York. For all the details, please view my full CV, while works in progress can be followed through my blog. As a cell biologist, I dealt with analytical cytology quite early in my career. Whilst not being exclusively specialized in flow cytometry, I exploit the incredible power and the elegant performance of flow cytometry analysis to address several questions related to my scientific interests. I am mostly interested in the control of skeletal muscle differentiation and homeostasis and, more recently, in tissue engineering applications for regenerative medicine of this tissue. I had the honor to become an ISAC Scholar in 2006 and since them I am member of this society. Interests and vision I came across ISAC through my mentor, Dr. Laura Teodori at a time when I was doing my postdoctoral training about 10 years ago. Being scientifically seduced by the powerful applications of analytical cytology I started to attend ISAC international congresses and to participate more actively to the initiatives of the Society. At the XXIII ISAC congress in Quebec in 2006, I was awarded the ISAC Scholarship. As an ISAC Scholar I was encouraged to collaborate to the educational and organization strategies of the Society. I was young, mobile and without a tenured position. I felt sympathetic with the younger members of the Society and concerned about the typical issues they have to deal with: practicing, traveling, finding the resources to do that. By co-chairing a subcommittee of the MSC (Membership Services Committee) dedicated to Students' services in 2004-'08, I helped with the divulgation of skills and resources aimed to improve student members' success rate when applying to mobility grants. For instance, at the XXIV ISAC congress in Budapest in 2008 I participated to the Scientific Professional Skills Workshop with a presentation entitled “Short term mobility grants: tips and hints.” These issues found concrete development in the ISAC web page highlighting grants opportunities for short term mobility and for young fellows (originally published on the ISAC web site, http://www.isac-net.org/content/view/693/137/). I was responsible for that page, updating it twice a year and offering tutoring and advice to ISAC student members, with the aim to help their mobility and grant rising capacity. Today, from a more mature position inside the Society I wish to contribute to consolidate ISAC strengths and to further develop its potentials, hence my interest in the candidature for an ISAC Councilor position. In this position I could possibly exploit my growing experience and creative attitude to serve our common goals. I foresee two critical issues ISAC shall deal with in the incoming years: 1) geographical and intergenerational growth and 2) interaction with novel scientific and technological research areas. 1) I am convinced that our Society should invest more than ever on youngs. As far as I know ISAC educational and scholarship programs see an unprecedented success, which highlights the interests into our society by young researchers. ISAC should be even more attractive than today for them. In order to do so, we should pursue our politic of open access for young members, and of tutoring and education initiatives. Also, ISAC could set up initiatives aimed to assist its younger members in fund rising (startups, mobility). The initiatives could range from helping members to find senior partners for big grant applications to assisting members to identify calls and apply to them (a task often performed by specific services that are present only in major departments and universities). Obviously, the current programs dedicated to tutoring and visiting initiatives for young members would be synergistic with the novel actions I propose. An international society such as ISAC should become the catalyzer for exchanges and interactions not only vertically (between generations) but also horizontally (between emerging countries, where it is largely underrepresented, and consolidated scientific environments). So I would love to see novel initiatives, aimed at networking and diffusing the analytical cytology, especially targeted to the younger members and to researchers from emerging countries. 2) While being well developed in the US, tissue engineering and regenerative medicine are novel, fast growing disciplines in several countries, including european countries such as Italy and France, or Asian giants such as India and China. This area of Medicine is attracting more and more public and private financing, given its translational nature and high technological content, which in turns stimulates a growing involvement by scientists. Given the foreseen rapid shift to clinical practice in this field (indeed a reality for certain applications) it is of pivotal importance to set up at the same time innovative approaches and safety/quality control procedures for stem cell isolation and transfer, as well as for immunological stereotyping of host-implant interactions. In this context there is an important opportunity for ISAC to become the reference for such procedures and approaches. Thus, I would like to establish initiatives aimed to boost the collaboration between ISAC and non-ISAC members for regenerative medicine applications. An other level of interaction could be within the journals associated to those societies which represent the analogues of our Cytometry; politics encouraging cross-publication (and even cross-advertising for the scientific societies) could be built and I would be happy to collaborate on this. I wish that the publication of this text can be a matter of discussion and engagement by others and myself independently from my candidature as ISAC councilor. I really think that these issues are relevant for ISAC development and I am looking forward to seeing them dealt with.