INTRODUCTION to the ENMC Early-Career Programme

One of the key pillars of the ENMC is to help junior researchers connect with established scientists and clinicians in the neuromuscular field and to give them a chance to obtain state-of-the art knowledge on research topics. We are very proud of the Early-Career Programme (formerly known as the Young Scientist Programme), which allows predominantly PhD students, post-docs and young medical doctors to participate in ENMC workshops of their choice where they listen, present their research, discuss and report on the workshop outcomes.

From a Survey done in 2020, it became clear that the ENMC Early-Career Programme helped these young researchers to expand their network, to start new international research collaborations and to find new internships and/or positions. While most were intrinsically interested in the field of neuromuscular disorders (NMD), results of the survey stressed the importance of creating more career opportunities and positions with good tenure-track perspectives to encourage the most promising people to stay in the NMD field. Close interaction with inspiring NMD leaders also emerged as an aspiration and important motivational drive. This is why the ENMC has developed, next to the Early-Career Programme, the ENMC Mid-Career Mentoring Programme (see next webpage).

If you are currently working in the field of neuromuscular disorders as:

  • a PhD-student,
  • a Postdoc researcher, or
  • a Medical Doctor graduate

and you are interested in attending one of the upcoming ENMC workshops of your choice, you can follow the Guidelines and complete the Template Form and CV to apply for the Early-Career Programme. You will need to discuss with the workshop organisers what your role will be at the workshop and in the workshop organisation.

Authorship NMD full papers

Early career researchers (a maximum of three) will be listed as part of the Study Group and may be nominated by the workshop organisers and ENMC to become named individual co-author of an ENMC full report if significant contributions are made to the organization of the workshop and its reports. This should be approved by the Editor-in-Chief of Neuromuscular Disorders, upon submission by the organisers, along with the workshop report, of a letter introducing the early career participants and explaining their respective contributions beyond workshop participation. All workshop participants will be included in the “ENMC XXXX Workshop Study Group”, so that they can be found in PubMed as co-authors of the workshop report.  The workshop participants/report authors will be listed at the end of the report, with their institute, town and country.

We wish you good luck and in case of questions please don’t hesitate to contact the ENMC at enmc@enmc.org.