Dear Colleagues,
After three months of intense and collaborative work, the CETAF-DiSSCo Task Force is ready to present the outcomes achieved so far by the dedicated groups of volunteers. The Task Force is composed by over 60 participants worldwide that have been gathering every Friday since April 3rd, to share their expertise and knowledge built on top of Natural Science Collections, and address 4 areas: 1) animal virus carriers; 2) construction of a knowledge base relevant for pandemics; 3) preservation of viral evidence; and 4) metadata registering practices.
We are happy to invite you to this public event that, due to the current circumstances, will be held online. Coming from all over the world, these experts will share the results of their collective activities that jointly aimed to identify how our community could better contribute to prevent pandemic outbreaks by sharing their respective scientific knowledge.
The event will be introduced by Dr Pam Soltis (curator of Molecular Systematics & Evolutionary Genetics at the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida. and Director for Research Activities for iDigBio) that will give us the context and challenges of this initiative. This will be followed by presentations by the 4 Activity leaders who will share their work. Following the presentations, you will have the opportunity to engage with the COVID-19 Task Force volunteers and all the rest of participants.
We look forward to welcoming you onboard on Friday July 17th at 14:00 pm CEST on zoom (that's 8 AM EDT). Please share this invitation with your colleagues and circulate it through your networks to spread the voice.
Use this timeanddate.com link to find time of event in your zone (12:00 UTC, 1.5 hour event). (Note this timeanddate link works from this calendar announcement, but doesn't work from the google calendar event notice for some reason).
Stay tuned on all, follow our social media channels and participate! (for those who cannot attend, the event will be recorded and accessible on CETAF and DiSSCo youtube channels).
https://twitter.com/eurotaxonomy
https://www.facebook.com/eurotaxonomy/
Looking forward to welcome you all,
On behalf of CETAF-DISSCO COVID-19 Task Force
