Catch up on the SOPHIE conference

We launched our Strategic Research Agenda for Oceans and Human Health this week, using two online webinars to discuss the future development of this increasingly important field.

The events were hosted by our partners at RIVM in the Netherlands, with day one open to everyone and attended by over 240 people across the world.

This first day replaced our planned conference in Brussels and introduced our new Strategic Research Agenda, setting out a road map for oceans and health science over the coming decade.

Members of our advisory board introduced the three action areas of the agenda, and you can watch that in the webinar recording below.

Day two took a deeper dive into each of the research areas underpinning the strategic research agenda, with presenters from across the project explaining a broad array of research methods; from systematic mapping to community engagement.

Lively debate characterised sessions from both days, with our team receiving more questions than they had time to answer. We’re currently exploring ways to continue the conversation and provide responses to the queries posed – which numbered over 50! Keep an eye on our Twitter and LinkedIn channels for these discussions.

You can watch the presentations from day two in the video below.

Part of the original plan for our in-person conference had been to have a session for early-career researchers to present their work. This was difficult to achieve with the online format but we’ve uploaded their posters in our resources section for you to download and view.

We were also lucky to be joined by artists from Getekend Verslag who created a beautiful visual overview of the day one proceedings. There’s a small version of that below and you can download a large pdf at the bottom of this page.

Thank you to all those who participated in these events and if you haven’t done so already, head over to our Strategic Research Agenda page to explore how we think oceans and human health science should evolve in the coming years. There’s also a specially created toolkit available to help you share the message.

The key points from our day one webinar creatively captured by Getekend Verslag.