The Scientific Council for Virology at the International Association of the Academies of Sciences (IAAS) held an inaugural meeting on 9 June, 2020 in a video conference mode. The meeting was jointly organized by National Academy of Sciences of Belarus, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Russian Academy of Science.

The participants of the meeting supported the initiative to set up the scientific council for virology. National Academy of Sciences of Belarus (NASB) deputy chairman, Academician Aleksandr Kilchevsky, scientific director of the Mechnikov Research Institute of Vaccines and Sera Vitaly Zverev and director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Academician Gao Fu have been named co-chairman of the scientific council for virology. Both of the chairmen appreciate it as a great opportunity to take Russia-China exchanges on virology forward, and to build synergy among professionals to advance biotechnologies, for the benefit of mankind in this Community of Shared Future. The inaugural meeting discussed the lines of activity of the scientific council, including joint research, training in virology and new vaccine prospects.

Academician Gao Fu said: “this webinar is one of the first steps in that direction. While the topic of today is COVID-19, we assure the scope of our discussions in the future will go far beyond it, to include other topics of common interest in the fields of microbiology, virology, and immunology as well. I do hope that this event will be a start of a series of productive exchanges that we are going to have in the next few months, and many more years to come.”

IAAS was set up in Kiev in 1993. Since 2017, the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus has been performing the functions of a basic academy of sciences in organizational and methodological support of IAAS. Academician Vladimir Gusakov has been elected head of the International Association of the Academies of Sciences. The supreme governing body is the IAAS Council. The association currently consists of 16 full-fledged and 10 associate members. The IAAS has 24 scientific councils. The mission of the scientific council for virology is to organize joint research, to provide scientific examination of developments in this field of science.

2020.06.09