On September 13, the 5^th annual symposium of the strategic program Infection & Immunity took place at Villa Jongerius in Utrecht. It was a buzzing face-to-face meeting with about 110 colleagues attending. The symposium was hosted by Maaike van Mourik (Dept. of Medical Microbiology) and Marc Bonten, who kicked off as I&I chair with an update of the strategic program.

Subsequently, there was a mini-symposium on ‘Many facets of complement, from patient to molecule to treatment’ where the perspective of the clinician, patient, and fundamental and translational scientists related to complement system and complement-associated diseases and treatment were discussed.

Subsequently, recipients of the I&I Grant 2021 presented their awarded collaborative projects:

• FAST (Flow cytometry in Acute infectiouS patients at the emergency departmenT) – Bernard Jukema/Titus de Hond
• To unravel the role of innate signals in the (pre-)differentiation and function of naïve T-cells – Theo van den Broek/Femke van Wijk

The strategic program I&I also held its 5th award ceremony for best I&I publication as first author by our PhD candidates. The award winner received 750 euro free to spend. Three candidates - Ramin Raoof, Lisanne de Vor and Jiannan Cui - were selected by an I&I reviewing committee chaired by Erik Hack to present their publication at the meeting. After live audience voting, the award was won by Ramin Raoof for his 2021 paper in Neuron titled “Macrophages transfer mitochondria to sensory neurons to resolve inflammatory pain.”

Ramin Raoof, PhD (Winner of the Erik Hack Publication Award)

The meeting was concluded with the keynote lecture ‘Investigating Science & Misconduct in Biomedical Research’ by Elisabeth Bik, a Dutch-American microbiologist who has worked for 15 years at Stanford University and 2 years in industry. Since 2019, she is a science integrity volunteer and occasional consultant who scans the biomedical literature for images or other data of concern and has reported over 6,000 scientific papers. She highlighted amongst others her systematic scan of 20,000 papers in 40 journals and found that about 4% of these contained inappropriately duplicated images. In her talk she presented her work and showed several types of inappropriately duplicated images and other examples of research misconduct. In addition, she showed how to report scientific papers of concern, and how journals and institutions handle such allegations.

Keynote lecture by Elisabeth Bik, PhD