The purpose of the annual partnership meeting is to facilitate interactions and networking between the nodes of the Nordic EMBL Partnership. In addition, the meeting creates an excellent platform to showcase the research being done on molecular medicine in the Nordics.
Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland (FIMM), the Finnish node of the Nordic EMBL Partnership, hosted this years Partnership meeting. The meeting took place in Dipoli, the main building of Aalto University in Espoo, Finland, bringing together over 200 participants from NCMM, FIMM, DANDRITE (Danish Research Institute of Translational Neuroscience), MIMS (Laboratory for Molecular Infection Medicine Sweden) and EMBL (European Molecular Biology Laboratory).
Tandem talks demonstrate Nordic collaboration
The meeting program included keynote lectures, partnership updates, and flash talks, as well as poster sessions.
New to this year’s conference was the introduction of tandem talks, where researchers from different nodes presented together on collaborative projects. These were well received by the audiences, who found it inspiring to see examples of cross-node collaboration.
Here, NCMM group leader Camila Esguerra presented alongside Gilles Vanwalleghem from DANDRITE on how they use zebrafish to study neurological diseases. In addition, NCMM PhD student Johanna Lehtonen and Antti Hassinen from FIMM presented their collaborative effort in using high-content imaging analysis for phenotyping patient samples.
The conference program also included talks from several researchers at NCMM. These included Anthony Mathelier who was introduced as the new associate director of NCMM, and Biswajyoti Sahu and Charlotte Boccara, who were introduced as NCMM’s newest group leaders.
Program for Young Investigators
PhD students and postdocs were invited to attend the meeting for two extra days prior to the main program. The Young Investigator Meeting (YIM) is an integral part of the annual meeting, as it provides an arena for PhD students and postdocs to interact, learn new skills and take part in team building activities. One of the activities this year was working together to navigate the seas on sailboats, fitting with the YIM meeting topic of "Sailing into the unknown: building bridges and forging collaborations".
Johanna Lehtonen, PhD student in Janna Saarela’s group at NCMM, was part of the organizing committee of the YIM event, and talks about the importance of this arena in the video below:
For more interviews and a summary of the conference, please see the news article posted on the Nordic EMBL Partnership website.
NCMM will host the Nordic EMBL Partnership meeting in Oslo the 16-19th of September 2024.
