It was in April 1986, right before Rita Levi-Montalcini and Stanley Cohen were awarded the Nobel Prize, that the now well-established tradition of NGF Meetings was launched to celebrate a growing field that has always been felt as family. After Gordon Conference of Neurotrophins (later GC Neurotrophic Factors and more recently, GC Neurotrophic Mechanisms in Health and Disease) was established in 1993, this community started to grow at faster pace and new generations of researchers, discoveries and applications of neurotrophic factors came to populate the family and diversify the discussion.

Many of us have dreamed with a more regular platform to update each other on our more recent discoveries and foster fresh collaborations across the field. When the outbreak of COVID-19 forced us to cancel most of our immediate conferences (including the NGF meeting 2020 in Berlin and the following Gordon Conference) and to rely on technology to keep working and meeting remotely, we saw a great opportunity too: the possibility to establish an open, international and more frequent virtual event that keeps us connected during these unprecedented times, and hopefully consolidates into a new tradition in the years to come.

The new NGF Webinar Series started on May 2020 and is currently being hold every second Thursday of the month. For each seminar, we host one speaker to give a 30 mins presentation, followed by 15 mins of open discussion. We use Zoom, a safe and private service for videoconference. Questions are collected in the text chat, and at the end of the presentation we leave time to ask those questions directly to the speaker. Date and time of the sessions are announced in advance in the website, and reminders are sent on the week of the seminar, since they may vary to adjust to the timezone of the speaker and maximise online attendance. In addition, the session will be recorded and made available via a private link to all registered users to be watched within 24 hours. Questions from the offline audience are read and will be discussed by the speaker by email during that period. After that, the content will be permanently deleted to comply with the confidentiality agreement.

The series is open to any researcher with interests on neurotrophic factors biology, both in physiology and disease, from molecular mechanisms to population scale, from fundamental research to applied biotechnology. We especially encourage early-career researchers (postdocs, PhD students, new PIs) to apply for giving talks about their current projects; however, novel ideas and emerging projects from consolidated PIs are welcome too. As the material and ideas presented in this seminar series are novel and often unpublished results, they are considered strictly confidential and cannot be recorded by using any media without authorisation of the speaker.

Thanks for registering and join the community!