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.
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.
We have always been motivated and operated by early career researchers and strive to serve the ECR community.
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)
OILS 2019
Organization Committee
Christina Ambrosi (UZH), Noémie Frezel (UZH), Karolina Werynska (UZH), Laetitia Thieren (UZH), Lia Kallenberger (ETH), Pau Perez (ETH), Gabriel Schweizer (UZH), Daisy Canepa (USZ), Claudia Corro (USZ/Francis Crick Institute), Sucheta Sridhar (UZH)
OILS 2018
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)
PostDoc Day 2013-2017
Our origins
Originally created by PostDocs at ETHZ in the Institute of Biochemistry, we have grown from a small one-day affair for ETH PostDocs to a two-day conference for all Early Career Life Scientists from anywhere in the world.