History of OILS association
The Open Innovation in Life Sciences conference has been in its current form of a two-day cross-institutional event focusing on career development and open science for early career life scientists since 2018. We evolved from an annual one-day event called "PostDoc Day," which was created in 2013 by the PostDoc Association (PACE) in the Institute of Biochemistry at ETH Zürich to connect life science postdoctoral researchers in D-BIOL.
In 2017, Dr. Christian Feller (an ETH postdoc at the time) inspired by the Structural Genomics Consortium began the OILS initiative with a team of postdocs and PhD students from ETHZ, UZH, and USZ to create an open and collaborative research community, which resulted in the inaugural 2018 OILS conference.
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Following the successful inaugural conference, Dr. Joyce Kao and Dr. Christina Ambrosi (the committee chairs of the OILS 2018 and OILS 2019 annual conferences) supported by open science leaders, officially founded the OILS association in 2020.
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We have always been motivated and operated by early career researchers and strive to serve the ECR community.
OILS 2024 - Hybrid
Organization commitee
​We were back in Zurich! Apart from in-person attendance, we also had live-streaming for out international participants.
Eisha Mhatre (The Experimentalist), Milton Villegas (Uni concepcion), Asa Walberg (USZ/UZH), DusanDenic (UZH), Polat Goktas (Uni College Dublin), Vikashini Balasubramanian (Freelancer), Abantika Ghosh (Texas A&M Uni), Prashanth Rai (SSSIHL)
OILS 2022 - Hybrid
Organization Committee
Anca-Denise Ciuta (ETHZ), Sandipan Tewary (UZH), Viktorija Sukyte (ETH), Weronika Potok (ETH), Fabienne Brutscher (UZH), Yuan Chi (UZH) , Elisa Dietrich (UZH/USZ), Juyeon Kim (Binnobase, Korea), Katarzyna Kita (UZH), Lia Kallenberger (external), Nicola Pietro Montaldo (Osla University Hospital)
OILS 2020 (Virtual)
Our first virtual conference
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we embraced the challenges of going virtual.
Meneka Rupasinghe (UZH), Alessandra Cereghetti (USZ), Devmini Moonamale (UZH/USZ), Michael Cangkrama (ETHZ), Clémence Mooser (USZ/UZH), Laura Ducimetiére (USZ), Sam Edalat (USZ/UZH), Prajwal (UZH/Clemedi AG), Ino Karemaker (UZH), Theresa Rauschendorfer (ETHZ)
PostDoc Day 2013-2017
Organization Committee
Monica Ghidinelli (ETHZ), Joyce Kao (NYU/ETHZ), Mateusz Wietecha (ETHZ), Rodrigo Villasenor (UZH), Nino Nikolovski (ETHZ), Evan Williams (ETHZ), Andrea Aloia (ETHZ), Laura De Vargas Roditi (USZ/UZH), Marieke Buffing (ETHZ), Sukalp Muzumdar (ETHZ), Tobias Weiss (USZ/UZH), Agnes Michel (ETHZ), Servan Grüninger (reatch/UZH/EPFL), Christian Feller (ETHZ)