Zoetis 2017 travel grant

The European Congress of Entomology (11^th Edition), Naples, Italy, 2-6 July 2018

Irina Matetovici

Veterinary Protozoology Unit,

Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp, Belgium

imatetovici@itg.be

The European Congress of Entomology (ECE) is organized every 4 years and brings together researchers from multiple scientific areas of entomology. This year the 11th edition was organized in Naples Italy, where more than 1000 scientists from 65 countries gathered and presented their work. The scientific program included 12 sessions covering many current hot topics in the insect world like invasive species, insect vector biology, innate immunity and host-parasite interactions, epidemiology and management and control of insect pest. The ECE gave me the possibility to follow different sessions and to broaden my knowledge on the latest achievements in the field.

I was selected to present a poster untitled “Thioester-containing proteins in the tsetse fly (Glossina spp.) and their response to trypanosome infection” in the session Molecular and cellular interactions between insect vectors and the pathogens they transmit. This study is part of my Ph.D. thesis and it was recently published in one of the leading entomology journals, Insect Molecular Biology. During the poster session I had the opportunity to present and discuss my results with many fellow scientists. Furthermore, I received a positive feedback and suggestions for possible follow up experiments.

Moreover, participation to ECE facilitated the interaction with other researchers studying tsetse fly biology and discuss current common projects. The International Glossina Genomics Community, to which I am a member, is performing an extensive comparative genomics analysis on six tsetse fly species and during the ECE I participated to a meeting with the other partners setting the last details before the study publication.

I would like to thank Zoetis and the BSPP for awarding me the travel grant and facilitating my participation to ECE. I encourage the other BSPP PhD students to apply for this grant.

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