The VPH Institute is now open to the ordinary membership
The Virtual Physiological Human Institute for Integrative Biomedical Research, in short VPH Institute, has been recently established and it is now starting the membership campaign.
The VPH Institute is an international non-profit organisation incorporated in Belgium, whose mission is to ensure that the Virtual Physiological Human is fully realised, universally adopted, and effectively used both in research and clinic. After its legal incorporation, the Institute is now recruiting new members. The statute defines that only institutions can become members of the VPH Institute, with two kinds of membership: general member, and supporting member. The supporting members for the first year of activities have already been appointed and they currently sit on the Board of Directors. We are honoured to have ten of the most prestigious institutions worldwide covering this role. You can download the composition of the Board of Directors from here: https://www.biomedtown.org/biomed_town/vphinstitute/reception/VPHI_BoD
Ordinary members will be the vast majority. They will have the right to appoint a representative to the General Assembly, which is the sovereign governance body of the Institute. The General Assembly elects every year the members of the Board of Directors among the supporting membership, and the members of the Board of Trustee among the general membership. They will be constantly informed of all initiatives and opportunities related to the VPH, and will have the possibility to express their opinions on strategic documents, proposals for policies, recommendations for standards and protocols, etc.
The reasons for joining are many and strong: nowadays research is turning into a truly competitive environment, where heterogeneous interests heavily interfere with the strategic decisions on what should be funded. In this context, the VPH Institute is the best hope to speak with one voice and be better represented!
If your research group is already involved with some VPH research projects, the decision on whether to support the VPH Institute should come quite easy: if you want your research funding stream to continue and even possibly to increase, the institute is your best chance. If you are not yet involved with VPH projects, but you are active in sectors such as biomedical engineering, computational physiology and biology, biomathematics, biochemistry, and biophysics, systems biology, or if you are interested in applications of computer science to the biomedical domain VPH research might be the best target for your research in the next years, and joining the VPH Institute the quickest way to get involved. If you look at your own domain you will see that the most exciting papers published in the last few years are those that try to integrate across space-time scales. While there is always a risk in redirecting our research toward a non-traditional domain, there are also great possibilities ahead.
If you are in a clinical research group, or in a small-medium enterprise with interests in research and innovation in biomedicine, joining the VPH Institute could be the best chance to seriously boost your achievements. You will be placed in a network within which you will have access to very heterogeneous backgrounds and know-how, and where most likely a radical innovation to your specific sector of interest is possible. You will have the possibility to see all approaches being explored, choose those you like most, and put them at test in clinical or industrial contexts, so to turn them into real-world solutions for future healthcare.
If you are interested to join the VPH Institute, download this application form, compile it, and send it to the Institute manager (contin@tecno.ior.it) following the instructions enclosed. Becoming a member does not involve any particular obligation for your institution. The Board of Directors agreed to waive membership fees for 2011, so becoming a member will cost you nothing, right now. If you like how things develop, you can confirm your membership for 2012.
For more information A brief description of the Institute, including its mission and vision statements, can be found here: https://www.biomedtown.org/vphinstitute/reception/whatis/ A detailed chronology of the Constitution process can be found here: https://www.biomedtown.org/vphinstitute/reception/constitution/ More information on why to join the Institute, can be found here: https://www.biomedtown.org/biomed_town/vphinstitute/reception/repository/documents/why_joining_the_VPH_Institute_v2.pdf?action=download The application form can be found here: https://www.biomedtown.org/biomed_town/vphinstitute/reception/repository/documents/vphinst_membership_form_2011.doc?action=download