Speeches and Speeches

Janne attended this week to the Annual meeting of European Federation for Pharmaceutical Sciences (EUFEPS) at the University of Naples in Italy, and he was actually selected one of the speakers, to tell his journey with LAT1. Janne was also earlier selected as a part of the EUFEPS Young Section Committee, whose main purpose is to provide support initiatives aimed at young EUFEPS members (in addition to the support for the main board). So good one, Janne!

We also had a little bit sad week, since 4 our staff members said goodbye and stepped into well-deserved retirement (from left to right, Technician Anne, Pharmaceutical Chemistry Lecturer Pekka, Toxicology Lecturer Risto, and Pharmacology Lecturer Anne). Risto wanted to give us the farewell seminar, telling the story of his career, which was indeed very inspiring. He also showed how science was presented back in the old days; unfortunately, the old projector lamp was not that sharp, but on the tble you may see how the posters were done, cutting and gluing the results to the very large paper. 😂

People come and go...

Although the previous post was all about new people joining our group and some leaving and graduating, I have to continue the topic with this post. Yesterday, we had the farewell coffees for Moritz and Ana, who joined us as ERASMUS students in January. Ana did the synthesis of novel PP2A analogs originally with Santosh and later on Mikko jumped into the supervision - big thanks to both of you for the flexibility! Let's hope we have something to continue with! And Moritz worked mainly with OATP2B1-prodrugs, partly continuing Unna's project, but also doing a lot of everything else for which we are also very thankful and hope that will also soon lead to results that can be read from the publication. 😀

And the summer period has officially started, swallows have arrived! 

Welcome Joel!

I don't understand why time flies so quickly these days... but I guess it is a good sign, at least there have been or will be soon several graduations, as Unna and Riina have finished everything in their Master programme and they wrapped up nicely the OATP2B1 project, or should I say 2 parallel projects. Of course, there are still minor things to continue before we can write the manuscripts of those results, but it is looking good at the moment in that field! Also, Jerry and Sanni had their master's thesis seminars this week, so getting closer to graduation (and of course I forgot to take photos...).

Also, last week, a new member and Ph.D. student, Joel, started in our group, and to keep us above the surface, Joel will do synthesis, starting with Juuso's CAT1-derivatives, but the aim of his Ph.D. will be purely on computational studies on OATP1B1/1B3. But more about that later, as we will kick that off, once we get other synthetic things rolling smoothly, but anyway, welcome to the team! So, 3 new group members gained, one lost in the past 8 months or so, we are on the positive side! 😎