The EU NanoSafety Cluster face - to - face meeting took place on Wednesday October 18th at the University of Birmingham Brussels Office followed by a workshop on Data Harmonisation, co - organised with the European Chemicals Agency on October 19th.
NSC Face - to - Face Meeting & ECHA Data Harmonisation Workshop
The overall aim of the workshop was to bring together EU coordinators of recently completed, ongoing and newly starting projects and other interested parties, including ECHA, to discuss accessibility to, and curation of, nanosafety data. A key objective of the workshop was to increase the NSC community’s ability to pool data, enhance data sharing and collaborations within the NSC, and facilitate future data import into ECHA’s European Union Observatory for Nanomaterials (EUON).
Day one
Following a warm welcome and an update on the status of the NSC by its Chair, Eva Valsami - Jones, Flemming Cassee then took the platform to outline the responses to our survey of the action plan for 2017 - 2020, and the projected next steps. The proposed NSC Task Forces then delivered incisive presentations on their specialist areas of nanoTiO 2 (Damjana Drobne); a definition of Safe - by - Design (Claire Skentelbery); Sustainability (Thomas Exner); Data exposure and management (Wouter Fransman); and ENM/Protein membrane interactions (Andrew Nelson). Andrea Haase presented an update on the US - EU nanoinformatics roadmap.
The afternoon of the first day began with a short overview of the forthcoming calls, focussing on the nanoinformatics and related topics from George Katalagarianakis. Project representatives then delivered brief presentations on strategies (past, present, future) for data capture, storage and archiving and data formats. The following projects provided valuable input:
