Executive Board 2016-2019 Elected

On 21 October, 2016, during the 6th Erupean Congress of Virology in Hamburg, the members of the Executive Board 2016-2019 were elected by the Assembly of Members:

First Vice PresidentBen Berkhout, Dept. of Medical Microbiology, Academic  Medical Center of   the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Second Vice PresidentNoël Tordo,  Instituts Pasteur, Paris-France, Conakry-Guinée

TreasurerDana Wolf,  Clinical Virology Unit, Hadassah  Hebrew University   Medical Center, Jerusalem, Israel

Secretary GeneralThomas Mertens, Institute for Virology, University Hospital of Ulm, Germany

New Advisory Council in Office

On 21 October, 2016, during the 6th Erupean Congress of Virology in Hamburg, the Assembly of Members elected the members of the Advisory Council 2016-2019:

Albert Bosch, Department of Microbiology, University of Barcelona, Spain
Margarita Del Val, Centro de Biología Molecular Severo Ochoa, Universidad  Autònoma de Madrid, Campus de Cantoblanco, Spain
W. Paul Duprex, Cell and Tissue Imaging Core, Dept. of Microbiology, Boston
Urs Greber, Institute of Molecular Life Sciences, University of Zurich,  Switzerland
Michael Kann, UMR-CNRS 5234, University of Bordeaux 2, France
Marion Koopmans, Erasmus MC Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Thomas Mettenleiter, Department of Molecular Biology, Friedrich-Loeffler-Institut,
Albert Osterhaus, Department of Virology, Erasmus MC, The Netherlands
Lennart Svensson, Div. of Molecular Virology, Med. Faculty, University of Linköping, Sweden
Jan Svoboda, Dept. of Viral and Cellular Genetics, Institute of Molecular Genetics, Czech Republic
Veronika von Messling, Paul-Ehrlich-Institut, Langen, Germany
Friedemann Weber, Institute for Virology, FB10 – Veterinary Medicine, Gießen, Germany

4th General Assembly of the European Society for Virology

During ESV’s 4th General Assembly to be held in Hamburg, Germany on October 21, 2016, final elections to the Advisory Council, President, and Executive Board will be held. Further topics will be, amongst others, an amendment of the ESV statutes and the election of Committee Chairpersons. Invitations will be sent to all members by e-mail and regular mail in September.

Junior Investigator Award: Nominations NOW Open

The Junior Investigator Award is given to outstanding young researchers in the field of virology during the European Congress of Virology (ECV). The Junior Investigator Award 2016 will be awarded during the 6th ECV in Hamburg, October 19-22, 2016.

Guidelines for Nominations

  1. Candidates should be within ten years* of completing their PhD. Women candidates should be allowed 18 months additional for each child born post PhD.
  2. There should be a European connection: either the candidate should be European or most of the work by the candidate should have been done in Europe.
  3. The candidate should show clear evidence of independence – judged, for example, by being senior author on (recent) publications.
  4. Nomination: Self-nomination, supported by two senior colleagues, full members of ESV or members of ESV-associated societies, or, nominations proposed by ESV Executive Board, by ESV Advisory Council or directly by the Chairman of the Award Committee.

*Therefore, for the Junior Investigator Award 2016, candidates should have been awarded their PhD no earlier than 2006.

Nomination Materials

Your nomination should include:

  • Name of candidate
  • Current place of work
  • Year PhD awarded
  • Candidate’s scientific career and scientific achievements (500 words)
  • Top 5 publications
  • Citation by proposer/seconder (300 words)
  • 1 page short CV: education, prizes/awards, funding, committees, etc
  • Full publication list

The Award

Award lecture at the European Congress of Virology, Award Certificate and a Travel Award

Nomination Deadline: 10th August 2016

Nominations should be sent to Professor John Skehel (Mill Hill Laboratory, The Francis Crick Instiute, London, UK), Chairman of the Awards Committe by email: John.Skehel@crick.ac.uk

Results Pre-Election Presidency

The pre-elections to the position of President of the European Society for Virology gave a clear result. Prof. Giorgio Palù was confirmed by an overwhelming majority as President of the European Society for Virology 2016-2019.

The voting participation was with a response rate of 50.8%. We thank all voting members for their cooperation.

The result of this pre-election has to be confirmed in the course of the Assembly of Members on October 21, 2016, during the 6th European Congress of Viroogy in Hambug, Germany.

Results Pre-Election Advisory Council

The pre-elections to the Advisory Council of the European Society for Virology gave a clear result. The voting participation was excellent with a response rate of 46.5%. We thank all voting members for their cooperation.

The following twelve members received the most votes and are thus pre-elected as Members to the Advisory Council (in alphabetical order):

Albert Bosch, Department of Microbiology, University of Barcelona, Spain
Margarita Del Val, Centro de Biología Molecular Severo Ochoa, Universidad Autònoma de Madrid, Campus de Cantoblanco, Spain
W. Paul Duprex, Cell and Tissue Imaging Core, Dept. of Microbiology, Boston University School of Medicine, USA
Urs Greber, Institute of Molecular Life Sciences, University of Zurich, Switzerland
Marion Koopmans, Erasmus MC Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Thomas Mertens, Institute for Virology, University Hospital of Ulm, Germany
Thomas Mettenleiter, Department of Molecular Biology, Friedrich-Loeffler-Institut, Federal Research Institute for Animal Health, Germany
Albert Osterhaus, Department of Virology, Erasmus MC, The Netherlands
Lennart Svensson, Div. of Molecular Virology, Med. Faculty, University of Linköping, Sweden
Jan Svoboda, Dept. of Viral and Cellular Genetics, Institute of Molecular Genetics, Czech Republic
Veronika von Messling, Paul-Ehrlich-Institut, Langen, Germany
Dana Wolf, Clinical Virology Unit, Hadassah University Hospital, Israel

In case one of the pre-elected 12 members of the Advisory Council is elected to the Executive Board later on, the candidate who has recieved the next highest number of votes will succeed to the Advisory Council.

The result of this pre-election has to be confirmed in the course of the Assembly of Members during the 6th European Congress of Viroogy in Hambug, Germany in October.

We thank the pre-elected members for accepting to serve in this council.

Prof. Dr. Giorgio Palù        Prof. Dr. Bernhard Fleckenstein
President                            Secretary General

Travel Grant Applications for 6th European Congress of Virology Extended

Especially to support young scientists the deadline for a travel grant application has been extended to 30 June 2016. ESV is offering 20 travel grants of 500 Euros each for young scientists to participate in the 6th ECV. To qualify for a travel grant an abstract has to be submitted too. The application deadline is now June 30, 2016.

Please see http://www.eurovirology2016.eu/travel-grants.html for more information.

Obituary to Karl Maramorosch

Professor emeritus and renowned scholar Karl Maramorosch was born 16 January 1915 and died of natural causes on 9 May 2016 at the age of 101 while visiting friends in Poland.  He was born in Vienna where his family had fled at the outbreak of World War I to evade the advancing Tsarist Army.  After the war the family returned to their farm in eastern Poland where Karl attended primary and secondary schools, graduating from the Moniuszko Conservatory of Music in 1934.  He considered becoming a concert pianist, but followed his father’s footsteps in agriculture and entered Warsaw University, graduating magna cum laude in agricultural engineering in 1938.  The same year he married his college sweetheart, Irene Ludwinowska, who was his steadfast companion for the next 70 years.  His childhood dream of becoming a virologist was interrupted the following year when the Nazis and subsequently the Soviets invaded Poland.  Karl and his young bride escaped across a heavily guarded bridge into Romania disguised as a Polish army major and his wife.  Here they were interred in refugee camps for the remainder of the war and where Karl became a skilled shoemaker.  His parents, brother and 127 close relatives perished in the Holocaust.

Eager to escape for a third time, now from Soviet-occupied Romania, Karl obtained a sham transit visa from friends in the Swedish Embassy in Bucharest that took the couple through Czechoslovakia and France to Sweden.  Here the American Consul classified Karl as a ‘skilled agriculturist” entitled to a First Preference immigration visa.  They arrived in New York City on 24 February, 1947.  Karl entered Columbia University and received his PhD in a mere two years while working as a technician at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden.  Upon graduation he was hired by Rockefeller University and was finally free to independently pursue his long deferred scientific interests.  Over the next 12 years, Karl was influenced by some of the most famous scientists of the time, particularly at Cold Spring Harbor where he worked most summers.  He spent long hours with Luria, Delbruck, Mayr, McClintock, Hershey and scores of other luminaries.  At Rockefeller, he modified the method of Weigl, who had been his brother’s professor in Poland, to microinject plant pathogenic viruses and phytoplasmas into leafhopper vectors.  This permitted him to obtain the first evidence that some plant pathogens multiply not only in plants but also in invertebrate vectors.  He performed experiments definitively demonstrating that the agent causing aster yellows multiplies in its vector.

Karl moved from Rockefeller University to the Boyce-Thompson Institute in 1961 where he made his most important contributions.  As Program Director of Virology, he and his coworkers were at the forefront of new and fascinating studies using the electron microscope to detect and characterize viruses and phytoplasmas in cells of diseased plants and insect vectors.  In 1974, Karl joined the Waksman Institute at Rutgers University where he later earned the coveted title Robert L. Starkey Professor of Microbiology.  In 1984, he made his final career move when he joined the Entomology Department at Rutgers.  Invariably the first to arrive to work, Karl continued to write, edit, lecture, travel, organize international conferences and mentor over the next three decades, until an injury finally forced him to retire to his daughter Lydia’s home in California.  Advancing age did not dim his passion for travel as he demonstrated by visiting Mt. Kilimanjaro on his 98th birthday.  When asked the secret for this exceptional vigor, he always responded “never stop working.”

Karl pioneered insect tissue culture, making major advances to our understanding of the replication of plant-pathogens in insect vectors and the interactions between insects, viruses, and plants.  His research laid a foundation for diverse and increasingly important use of invertebrate-based in vitro expression systems used today in agriculture, medicine, drug discovery, and mammalian cell gene delivery.  His early enthusiasm for what was once a small and unrecognized field developed into an important branch of science now demonstrating its enormous potential including the first cancer vaccine

Karl was a prolific writer and editor in serving the disciplines of virology, plant pathology and entomology with uninterrupted distinction across eight decades.  He edited more than 90 volumes and authored/coauthored hundreds of journal articles covering his research interests in comparative virology, invertebrate cell culture, parasitology, plant and insect disease, spirochetes, viroids, phytoplasmas, spiroplasmas and biotechnology.

Karl’s fluency in seven languages fueled his extensive international activities.  When the Justus Leibig University in Germany invited him, Karl lectured in German.  In Romania, as a guest of their Academy of Sciences, he made use of the Romanian he had acquired during World War II.  In St. Petersburg, Moscow, Armenia and Uzbekistan, he lectured in Russian, and in Poland in Polish.  He used his 37 visits to India to secure sufficient grasp of Hindi to impress his audiences.

Recognized throughout his life with awards and accolades, Karl’s proudest moment came in 1980 when he was awarded the $100,000 Wolf Prize, considered agriculture’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize, “for his pioneering and wide-ranging studies on interactions between insects and disease agents in plants.”  Countless further awards followed including the Jurzykowski Award in Biology, American Institute for Biological Sciences Award of Distinction and Distinguished Service Award, Japan Society for Promotion of Science Distinguished Professorship, two Fulbrights, Waksman Award and Medal, American Association for the Advancement of Science Campbell Prize, Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award of In Vitro Biology Society, Warsaw University Award of Distinction, and the Society of Invertebrate Pathology Founder’s Lecture Honoree.  He was elected to the German National Academy of Sciences, and was a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Phytopathological Society, New York Academy of Sciences Indian Virological Society, Indian National Science Academy and others.  He was an Honorary Member, Fellow and most significantly designated a “Legend” of the Entomological Society of America which also nominated him for the National Medal of Science.  His alma mater awarded Karl an Honorary Doctorate which he received at a ceremony in Warsaw in October 2014.

Karl Maramorosch, eminent virologist, entomologist, and plant pathologist, was a truly remarkable and multifaceted individual.  Not only was he a celebrated scientist, but a gifted pianist, amazing sleight of hand magician, a polyglot, world traveler, avid photo and videographer, and owner of a phenomenal memory.  Karl was an extraordinary person who lived an extraordinary life.  He will be missed by all those whose lives he touched over his long life.

Safe travel, Karl.

Obituary prepared by Randy Gaugler, Rutgers University, May 2016.