BLUES holds General Assembly meeting in Portugal

Sunshine, pasteis de nata, history at every corner, and blooming friendships - here's a rather informal assessment of the BLUES General Assembly meeting in Portugal. It was our fourth in-person meeting and we fully took advantage of this opportunity by engaging in many, many discussions related to our work, upcoming tasks and milestones, and foreseen challenges (but also Portuguese culture and traditions...).

We spent four days at the I3Bs - Research Institute on Biomaterials, Biodegradables and Biomimetics of University of Minho's headquarters at Avepark - Parque de Ciência e Tecnologia, close to Guimarães and Braga. Ahead of the meeting, several of our partners joined the sponge expert community at the 12th World Sponge Conference, conducting presentations drawing from their work in BLUES, and even going as far as winning the Best Flash Talk (more on that here). In fact, this proximity is what made us choose Portugal for this consortium meeting, and it proved to be a great one! 

We kicked off the meeting by reviewing what we had discussed previously in Genova, and then went on to check our progress for each of the working groups.We went over our achievements, the challenges we encountered and the solutions we found to tackle them, the lessons we learned, and how we can best approach the upcoming tasks, as the project is now almost midway. We also set aside some time for structuring our ideas in view of the review meeting we had on 18 September, and we were given a tour of the Research Institute by Tiago H. Silva, where we got to see a Donatello - not a scuplture by the famous Italian artist, but a tissue processing machine. 

Lastly, on the final day we had our review meeting with the European Commission, and we are happy to report that the feedback has been highly positive, and we are working on implementing a few changes based on the recommendations we got. We're excited to see what comes next!