The Grand Challenge of chronic non-communicable diseases is poorly recognized, but its severity and the economic burden it will place on societies over the next 50 years are enormous. A significant proportion of chronic diseases can be prevented by reducing socio-behavioral risk factors, increasingly the most significant of which is unhealthy diet.

We have expanded fundamentally the understanding of how polyphenols can promote health and prevent chronic disease through diet. Success was due to the fact that: our research was publicly funded, focusing on foods that were most nutritionally relevant to European consumers rather than pushed by commercial agendas; we used isogenic food materials, allowing precise assignment of health-promoting effects to specific polyphenols in a food context; we used animal models of disease as “black boxes” to assess the efficacy of phytonutrients supplied in foods avoiding complications associated with bioavailability, metabolism or dosage.

Our research is already impacting dietary recommendations and messages in the popular press. However, our progress marks only the foundations of the understanding required for the role of dietary polyphenols in promoting health and combating chronic disease. Investigations need to be extended so understanding can be translated into accurate dietary recommendations and preventive medicine strategies.

Employment opportunities for PhDs are limited in many European countries, but particularly so in Italy, where this issue has become a serious problem. Here, PhDs face severe difficulties in their approach to the labor market and in many areas, if not all, the doctoral title has become essential only for an academic career. Universities, public institutions and employers’ associations are aware of the importance of bringing PhDs in contact with the private sector and with the business community, and several actions have been conceived with this objective.

In this session we will discuss the occupational prospects of PhDs trained by the local academic system. This will be done comparing the experience and the opinions of Universities, local institutions (Regione Piemonte) and local employers’ associations (Unione Industriale di Torino) with that of the Association Bernard Gregory, a French non-profit organization which has a longstanding expertise in bringing the academic world in relation with the market, with the aim of finding new contacts and opportunities for job seekers.

This session will introduce the ESConet Trainers (www.esconet.org) approach to science communication training, based on many years' experience of working with European research networks. Unlike some other media training programmes, based on the "bag of tricks" approach, it emphasises genuine two-way communication - both talking and listening.

The European Union's "Science and Society Action Plan" underpins much of what is now required from European researchers in terms of their interactions with society at large and with their fellow citizens. This places many demands on researchers for which they get little, if any, training: interactions with the mass media, dialogue with citizens, etc. This session will give participants a chance to make contact and catch up with the latest thinking on training for communicating with their fellow citizens.

Climate change issues are clearly a growing concern for the public today. In recent years, people have received a great deal of information from media on the causes and consequences of climate changes, but – depending on countries and regions – the understanding of citizens and their engagement in these topics is still varied. Communication professionals are making effort to communicate the messages correctly. This panel session proposes to contribute to a global effort to develop news tools and actions on climate change from “informative” to the “active” procedures through the exchange and dissemination of practices that involve citizens in actions and dialogue.

The session will tackle with the complexity of public communication due to the huge amount of scientific data and the interaction of numerous fields of interest, from the local to the global level. Concerning “active procedures”, new methods – hand-on exhibitions, participative games, local citizens forums and many others– used by the science centres find ways for the public to be effectively engaged in such issues. Changing people’s behaviour – as consumers and as citizens – is notoriously difficult, but many social change campaigns have been wildly successful.

The central issue in this session is to better understand and facilitate the two-ways communication channels between the scientific community and the public. Specific attention will be given to the development of communication tools, fostering a correct and clear information to the non-expert public.

The metaphor of Network is currently one of the most popular ways of describing our contemporary society. Thanks to the employment of modern information technologies, in particular “internet” and “telecommunication networks”, people, private and public actors and places are in relationship worldwide. Networks can ignore boundaries, shorten distances, the “space of flows” goes side by side with the “space of places”. However, although some analysts have even foreseen the coming of a “flat world”, many signals give grounds for a different analysis: space is being deeply reshaped, geographical scales or levels are interlaced one another, underlining, thus, the strong relationships among actors and places. Therefore, it is important to highlight the quality and the effects of the relations among actors, territories and institutions. In particular the role of networks in shaping/influencing the urban and territorial policies.

All these processes raise many issues on which politicians, academics, representatives of “society” should be discussing: how do these networks interact with policies occurring at different territorial levels (local, regional, national)? how are they taken into account by policy makers? what are the network policies implemented or which need to be activated in order to increase the value of specificities and potentials of different territories? have these networks effects on real life, or are they just "representations"?