Letter From the President Fall 2023
September 20, 2023
Dear IZFS Members,
There has never been a more exciting time to be a scientist!
My first piece as President of the IZFS had to start with this sentence. The last ten years has seen an explosion of technologies to elucidate the most important questions in biology and biomedicine. Applying these to the zebrafish provides unprecedented opportunities for transformative research and in a world of environmental instability, scientific approaches have never been more important.
The IZFS has a key role to play in this new era. Our ambition is to provide support and tools to deliver the best zebrafish research across the world, reducing inequalities in the opportunities given to scientific communities across the gender, cultural and geographic landscapes.
To do so, we organize international conferences (Conferences), celebrate our research achievements and collaborative culture through awards (Awards) and provide opportunities for everyone across the globe, to access knowledge, tools, and technologies through our webinar series. This latter will, this year, be rejuvenated with contributions from international early career researchers. Watch this space.
In the era of ‘organoid’ research, our community has the duty to communicate how a vertebrate animal model, such as the zebrafish, provides a strictly necessary complement to a 3D culture technology that is still in its infancy. Integration of non-zebrafish invited speakers in our conferences is one way to engage conversations. Additional avenues for interactions will be explored this year.
Interactions and collaborations are also a focus across our own community, through activities such as FISHues and synergies across zebrafish Societies. The latter endeavor has started with the EZS and the ZDMS, coordinating conferences and synergising ECRs and Sustainability agendas and initiatives.
With the outstanding success of the Environmental Sustainability plenary session at the European Zebrafish Conference 2023, in Krakow, our community showed that the topic is at the centre of their interest. We need to maintain this momentum together, to respond ‘en masse’ to audits and make the ES sessions of the coming SCZI 2024 and IZFC 2024 even more useful and effective.
Finally, the zebrafish is not only a gorgeous model for research, but it also provides the opportunity to develop effective teaching approaches and outreach material to promote science to the public. This year the IZFS will therefore put in place a committee tasked to give support, visibility to, and promote, the role of the zebrafish in education and public engagement.
I start my job as President with great excitement and energy seeing how well Lila Solnica-Krezel and Kate Whitlock (past Presidents), the Board of Directors and EDI have together not only maintained but successfully developed the IZFS during this difficult post-covid era. I will do my very best to continue our effort in making the IZFS a truly international and inclusive society, driving excellence in research across boundaries, while being better at doing so with reduced negative impact on our environment.
In addition, I wish the IZFS to nurture our young international scientists, give them the platform to allow their work to be visible, whatever their country, and help them form international collaborations and find the support they need to thrive. So, which better way to do it than through involving much more effectively our early career scientists (postdocs and junior PIs) in the activities of our society. Now is the time to get diverse fresh blood and ideas. The IZFS is top heavy, yet China has shown this year that young scientists are interested in joining. Get your lab members to join and sign up for lab membership. I can’t wait to work with a larger and younger community!
Corinne Houart