November 2016 Blog Post - International ABE meeting in San Francisco

From Monday 14th to Wednesday 16th November, the project coordinators of the various ABE programme sites met up in sunny San Francisco. This meeting is held annually and is organised by the Education Development Centre, a non-profit organisation that globally coordinates the ABE programme and supports ABE sites worldwide. The meeting took place in the offices of WestEd, who currently run an in-depth evaluation study of the ABE programme in the United States. At the meeting, site representatives shared information and experiences on how to incentivise returning teachers, build up a functional community, identify good speakers for the training courses, resolve technical issues, as well as hear about new initiatives such as bioethics and bioinformatics modules. It was great to see so many people in person. During the rest of the year, the only contact is via email and webinars without any videos or pictures of the participants.  The meeting included a talk  by Dr Donna Flesher, Senior Scientist at Amgen Inc., who told us about her work in Clinical Biomarker Discovery and Development. According to Dr Flesher, a new generation of biopharmaceutical drugs will come in all forms and sizes.  In summary, it was a very inspiring meeting, everyone went home with ideas how to make the ABE programme even better than it already is.