Management meeting Tuscany

The sixth MINSC management meeting was held on Monday, March 9th during the network event in Tuscany.

The meeting commenced with a review of the original grant agreement to review what was promised to the European Commission at the start of the project. This included reviewing the location of secondments for MINSC fellows. The next MINSC progress report is due in June 2015, so the coordinator wanted to revisit these issues with all PIs and fellows to ensure compliance with the original agreement.

Following an email received from the project officer, Giuliana Donini, the coordinator encouraged all fellows and PIs to engage in outreach activities and to DOCUMENT these activities through the progress reports sent to the project manager on a semi-annual basis. Fellows can also document their activities on the fellow-run blog which can be viewed here: http://mineralscaleformation.wordpress.com/. The group discussed various possibilities for public outreach activities. Fellows were encouraged to collaborate across institutes when engaging in outreach activities.

The meeting next turned to a discussion of finances. Because University of Leeds has agreed to pre-pay network events, we have been able to keep network meeting costs below the originally planned budget. This means that there is more money available for non network training such as conference attendance or state of the art training in lab techniques for the fellows. Some fellows had questions about the various budget categories on Marie Curie ITNs so these issues were addressed by the project manager.

The interim payment received from the European Commission was distributed to all partners in January 2015 and PIs were asked to check that the money had been correctly allocated at their various institutes.

During the management meeting, fellows were encouraged to actively participate in the management of the network as it is important to understand the administrative aspects of running an international network.