Dear Friends and Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce that this year the ABCD and the SIBBM are organizing a Joint National Ph.D. Meeting to be held on 20–22 October 2011 at the Santo Spirito Convention Centre in Gubbio (PG). The combined meeting is the result of a joint initiatives programme between ABCD and SIBBM, which we hope to expand in the future.

Registration and abstract submission will open 27 June and close 16 September, and can be made online only.
Registration is open to all Ph.D. students including those that are not members of ABCD/SIBBM.

The full meeting programme will be made available after the abstract submission deadline; however, we are pleased to announce that this year's ABCD/SIBBM Lecture will be held by Stefano Piccolo.

A limited number of Ph.D. students (3 students per Ph.D. course) in their final year will be given the opportunity to present their work orally in English. All other Ph.D. students are invited to present their work as a poster in English (width 70 cm max.; height 100 cm max.). All participants are, however, required to submit an abstract, in which the year of study is clearly indicated. At the end of the meeting, the ABCD/SIBBM Prize for the Best Thesis, chosen from the oral presentations, and the ABCD/SIBBM Prize for the Best Poster, will be awarded.

The organizing committee responsible for selecting the oral presentations and awarding the prizes is composed by the organizers of the two Societies, as well as the following students:

• Cecilia Battistelli (Rome, Ph.D. student in Human Biology and Genetics, XXIV cycle)
• Matilde Cescon (Padua, Ph.D. student in Biosciences and Biotechnology, XXIV cycle)
• Sara Cioffi (Naples, Ph.D. student in Human Genetics, V cycle)
• Giulia D'Angelo (Palermo, Ph.D. student in Genomics and Proteomics in Oncology and Endocrine-Metabolic Research, XXIV cycle)
• Michela Palmisano (Milan, Ph.D. student in Molecular Medicine, XXIV cycle)
• Giusy Tornillo (Turin, Ph.D. student in Functional Genomics Applied to Translational Research, XXIII cycle)

Participants will be accommodated at the San Marco Hotel. If, as we hope, the number of participants exceeds the room capacity of the San Marco Hotel, additional participants will lodge in nearby hotels. Lunches and dinners for all participants will be held at the San Marco.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Paolo Di Fiore, Valerio Orlando, Giulia Piaggio, Stella Zannini