It is a great honour to have this opportunity and invite you to the Fifth ORPHEUS Conference on PhD Programmes in Biomedicine and Health Sciences in Europe.

The conference will be held in Vienna, April 8-10, 2010, at the Medical University of Vienna, Austria.

The forthcoming fifth Conference is on the theme “The Advancement of European Biomedical and Health Science PhD Education by Cooperative Networking”. On this topic, keynote speakers will provide impulses that we will further discuss in workshops to elaborate guidelines and strategies on the following issues:

• How to manage joint PhD degrees between different countries?
• How to manage a PhD education partnership between universities, research institutes and scientific societies?
• How to manage a PhD education partnership between academia and industry?
• How to promote mobility of students from less developed European countries?
• How to promote “healthy” brain drain and brain gain to raise the scientific potential both in the higher developed as well as in the less developed countries?
• How to raise funds for joint PhD programs, identify gaps in the national and

EU funding systems such as
• PhD programs that are missing in a variety of countries or
• EU programs that exclude less developed countries and
• how to lobby for these new initiatives?

Read more about ORPHEUS, the Organisation for PhD Education in Biomedicine and Health Sciences in the European System (http://www.orpheus-med.org/).

Bursaries for PhD students

The European Federation of Immunological Societies (EFIS) supports the conference by providing a package of travel bursaries. This allows us to award PhD students/candidates attending the conference and submitting abstracts with scholarships of up to 400 Euros per applicant.

PhD students/candidates may apply for one of the available travel scholarship by using the application form that can be downloaded (http://www.meduniwien.ac.at/orpheus2010/travel-bursaries/) and submitted to the congress secretariat (helga.bodor@meduniwien.ac.at). Awardees of the ORPHEUS 2010 Travel Scholarship will be notified by the end of February 2010. They will receive their grants upon claim during the congress at the registration desk.

On behalf of ORPHEUS 2010
Anita Jallitsch and Bernhard Knapp