President’s Welcome Message

Dear Members of the Society for Free Radical Research Europe

I am honoured to have been elected as President of SFRR Europe and extend my welcome to existing and new members of the Society. I value my long-standing involvement with SFRR Europe, SFRBM and SFRR International. In early September 2012, SFRR Europe hosted SFRR International at Imperial College in London, U.K. The 2012 Biennial meeting was a great success and, as its Chairman, I am indebted to the expert assistance and above all friendship provided by Executive and Council members of the Society.

During the past year, the Executive has encouraged support of Free Radical Biology & Medicine and Redox Biology, the two journals adopted by SFRBM and SFRR Europe.  I am delighted that several of our Society members have recently been appointed to the editorial boards of FRBM or Redox Biology, as well as, their respective publication committees. This partnership and our joint support of SFRR International provide a basis for bridging the field of free radical research from chemistry to translational therapies. The involvement of “free radicals” in signal transduction, cellular damage and disease provides an exciting and ever-evolving field of research for early career investigators.

SFRR Europe held very successful meetings in Athens in 2013 and Paris 2014, and our forthcoming meeting will be held in Stuttgart, Germany from 2-4 September 2015. Further information is available on our Society website, which has undergone significant redesign and development over the past year with the help of our General Secretary Juan Sastre and our IT colleague Rodrigo Ribes. We are continuing to upload further information, which should be of interest to established and early career members.

The Executive aims to create designated subcommittees, so that Council members will be able to contribute directly to the running of the Society. We have created new Society membership categories to enable colleagues to join either as a full member, postdoctoral/student member or with a double membership with an affiliated society. Moreover, we are encouraging our members to pay their annual membership fees via PayPal.

The Society will continue to support early career investigators, who are not yet fully established, via the annual award of the Catherine Pasquier Lecture as well as SFRR Europe Young Investigator Awards for promising young “stars”. In addition, special sessions for early career investigators will be included in the programme of our annual scientific meetings. The Society will also continue recognizing senior, established researchers via our annual awards of the SFFR Europe Annual Lecture, SFRR Europe Basic Science Lecture and SFRR Europe Clinical Lecture. In this context, I am particularly grateful for the support the Society receives from our sponsors for Basic (Elsevier) and Clinical (DSM) Award lectures.

As the incoming President of SFRR Europe, I would like to formally thank my predecessor, Prof. Nesrin Kartel-Ozer, and the other members of the SFRR Europe Executive and Council for their dedication in running the Society. If you require any further information, please do not hesitate to email me (giovanni.mann@kcl.ac.uk).

With best wishes for 2015,

Giovanni E. Mann, PhD
President , SFRR Europe