Spring is in the air!
It’s been a busy first quarter of the year, with scientific and grant writing workshops and coaching sessions, editorial assignments and large communications projects culminating in March. Below we summarize the highlights, along with brief mentions of interesting information we’ve come across in the literature and beyond. Happy reading!
The Elevate team
Trainings
Spring is typically a busy time for Swedish researchers as the Swedish Research Council (VR) has major funding application deadlines in March and April. We were very pleased to deliver, for the first time, an intensive workshop at Örebro University on how to frame and write VR-applications. Great interactions with, and feedback from, the 50+ participants (“Best workshop of my academic career!”); we hope to be back soon.
We also delivered several scientific writing and publishing workshops*, to old as well as new clients. The most recent one was to 40+ researchers at all career levels from the Danish Cancer Society Research Centre.
Editorial
Congratulations to Stefano Stella, Guodong Li and their 
respective co-authors on the publication of their research findings in Cell and Nature Electronics, respectively! In Cell, Stella et al. propose a model whereby the catalysis of CRISPR-Cas12a and resetting of endonuclease activity is promoted by conformational activation. Li et al. report the fabrication of microthermoelectric coolers with a rapid response time and high device reliability. We’re proud to have guided the authors with feedback on, and substantive editing of, their papers.
Communications
The past few months have been very hectic as we’ve finished two major communications projects. Two of the Novo Nordisk Foundation (NNF) research centres [Centers for Stem Cell Biology (Danstem) and Biosustainability (CFB)] were tasked by NNF to prepare major self-evaluation reports summarizing their raison d’être and major achievements since their launch in 2011, as well as to map out the strategy for the next 5 to 10 years. We supported both centres in developing these major documents.
For CFB we provided editorial support on the documents, which entailed detailed feedback on the texts and substantive and copy editing to ensure clarity and coherence in the narrative in these large documents (80 and 20 pages, respectively). For Danstem, in addition to providing editorial support, we also helped to frame the narratives at the outset and undertook the design and print production, thus managing the project end-to-end (see also Reflections below for a case study).
It was great working with Hanne (CFB), Gretchen (DanStem) and their respective teams to produce these important documents, and we wish both centres good luck for the evaluation!
The DanStem project in depth
We helped with the editorial as well as creative components of the project. Regarding the former, we helped with framing, developing editorial templates and substantive and copy editing of the documents. Regarding the latter, we developed a graphical profile and the creative concept, designed the graphics, implemented and proofread the layout, and helped with the print production. To read more about each component, click here for editorial, and here for creative.
*Header photo: workshop given to the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research researchers. Credit: Nellie Linander.
