Welcome! Benvenuti! Bienvenido! Bienvenue! Willkommen!
It is a great pleasure to invite you to the SETAC Europe 28th Annual Meeting, which will be held from 13–17 May 2018 in Rome, Italy.
Rome, capital of Italy with 3 million inhabitants. Rome “caput mundi”, the eternal city where you can enjoy the emotion of living 2781 years of history. Rome is the city of squares, fountains, churches and romantic ancient bridges on the River Tiber. It is the city where you can find ruins going back to its foundation (764 B.C.) by Romulus. The Rome that Julius Caesar ruled, where ancient gladiators fought, where the Roman temples and columns got transformed into churches. There is also the Rome from the Renaissance to the Barocco where the most important artists of that time came to renew the city creatively. Rome is a bustling, vibrant metropolis that effortlessly pairs history with contemporary style.
Rome is an open-air museum where its history gets blended into diverse and changing shapes overlapping with each other in a fascinating and inexhaustible fresco.
Travel
Due to its central location in the Mediterranean area, Rome is very easy and fast to get by plane with lots of direct international flight connections from most European cities (ca. 2 hours flight from Amsterdam, Brussels, Madrid, Paris, 2h and 30 mins from London). Rome is also well connected by high-speed train to other wonderful Italian cities like Florence (1h30min), Naples (1h10min) and Venice (3h15min) and to the fashion capital Milan (3h).
Venue
The Annual Meeting will be held in the Cloud, the new Rome Convention Centre designed by the Architect Fuksas. It is located in the EUR district, a few minutes by car from the centre of Rome and served by four metro stations (B Line).
The Scientific Programme
The Scientific Committee is dedicated to putting together a very valid scientific programme on the overarching theme “Responsible and Innovative Research for Environmental Quality”
Research and innovation have a double face: They can solve immediate problems and increase our well-being, but they can also have a strong impact on the environment, with an increasing rate of extraction of natural resources and of greenhouse gas and chemical emissions into air, water and soil, with detrimental acute or chronic toxic effects on ecosystem and human health.
Responsible research and innovation is an interactive and transparent process with which scientists and social actors work together on ethical and sustainability aspects in order to ensure a correct implementation of scientific progress in our society. The safeguarding of the environment is an ethical duty for every citizen and in particular for environmental scientists. In our society, the latter have a huge responsibility. They have to develop, communicate and implement knowledge, methods and tools regarding the management of the toxicological and ecotoxicological effects of chemicals, in order to reduce the risks they involve and regulate their use. Moreover, they need to find new ways of uncovering in advance the potential impacts of chemicals and to identify ways of anticipating and responding to them.
Environmental protection requires a constructive dialogue among various environmental sciences disciplines such as chemistry, ecology, toxicology, ecotoxicology, human health studies, engineering and social and economic disciplines in order to tackle this urgent and complex global problem at different levels. In addition, to be effective, it also requires a constructive dialogue among science, policy makers, business and citizens. The importance of communication is therefore evident: science and technology are becoming more complex, more difficult for non-experts to understand and, potentially, more disruptive or pervasive. Scientists and researchers should engage citizens and policy makers in evidence-based discussions relatively early in the development of new technologies, explaining the emerging risks and the progress of knowledge.
For this purpose, the SETAC 2018 Annual Meeting in Rome will be a place where scientists coming from various disciplines in academia, business/industry and government will find new opportunities to present, debate and disseminate the most recent scientific knowledge, developments and applications for reducing and regulating the use of chemicals, remediating soil, air and water and proposing more sustainable chemicals for responsible and innovative research.
Entertainment
We welcome you to Rome, a dazzling city with its giant marble symbols such as the Colosseum and Saint Peters, which respectively represent the city as the capital of the Roman Empire and Christianity, and “Vittoriano” or “Altare della Patria” which symbolises Rome as the capital of Italy. You can enjoy a multitude of Roman archaeological sites where you can see Roman houses (domus and insula), palaces, forums (Augusto, Cesare, Traiano, Minerva, etc.) and baths (Diocleziano, Caracalla) and, when you see a bas relief of an arch or a column, you can imagine Roman legions fighting in a battle or an Emperor passing by a triumphal arch with his trophies. Rome boasts 2000 fountains, 11 Roman aqueducts, 13 Egyptian obelisks, 1 pyramid, 900 churches, 20 bridges and 12 Villas with landscaped Parks. You can find several unique archaeological sites inside and outside (e.g. Villa Adriana, Ostia Antica, Villa dei Quntili, the Catacombs) the city which can be reached by walking or riding along an imperial road like the Via Appia. You can choose from among the tens of Rome museums and the many churches or squares where you can find masterpieces from some of the artists most famous worldwide like Raphael, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Caravaggio, Bernini, Borromini, Canova and many others.
You can also enjoy wonderful sunsets from one of the hills of Rome (Pincio, Aventine, Ganiculum), sunny squares and cobblestone streets, nightlife, delicious wine and local food with cheese, Roman pasta and pizza specialities. The Local Organising Committee is working very hard to offer our participants an exciting social programme.
We warmly welcome you to Rome and promise you an exciting scientific programme, lively entertainment and great social events in a typical Italian atmosphere.
Rome is a city where you will always find something new to discover.
More information:
https://rome.setac.org