UB chairs Eurolife network until 2017

The University of Barcelona (UB) coordinates the university network Eurolife from January 2015 to December 2017. Last November, the proposal was approved on the steering committee meeting. Coordination is headed by Albert Tauler, professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and representative of UB in Eurolife, and it is supported by the Office of the Vice-Rector for Research, Innovation and Transfer.

Eurolife is a consortium created in 1999 and composed by eight European institutions committed to research and higher education in the field of life and health sciences. The main objectives of the network are to promote transnational interactions by means of research collaboration, and to ensure that academic activities have a European dimension by developing postgraduate programmes, providing study fellowships and promoting student mobility programmes.

Besides UB, partner institutions are: the Trinity College Dublin (Ireland), the University of Edinburgh (United Kingdom), the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC, Netherlands), the Karolinska Institute (Sweden), the University Medical Center Göttingen, the University of Strasbourg (France) and the Medical University of Innsbruck (Austria).

Eurolife promotes research staff mobility in order to strengthen synergies and maximize international and interdisciplinary research. One of the projects of the network is the Eurolife Scholarship Programme for Early Career Researchers. It offers the opportunity to acquire new abilities in other research centre and increases international research.

Among other initiatives and with the aim of promoting joint postgraduate projects among universities, the Joint Programme in Translational and Experimental Medicine (JPTEM) was created in 2007. It permits master’s degree students to perform part of their studies at another Eurolife institution. More than one hundred students have already benefited from this mobility programme.

In addition, Eurolife is working on the creation of the Eurolife Joint PhD Programme, which aims at establishing international relations in the field of PhD research.