Alheimer Symposium in Kuopio

The 9th Kuopio Alzheimer Symposium was held in Kuopio during this week together with 3rd Nordic Memory Clinic Conference. Although I was not able to attent this time, our group was present there (Janne and Soumeya). One thing that is really missing from Kuopio is good venues for scientific events and a real congress hotel. However, our "Music Center" serves the best possible venue for event as big as this was.

See more details from the official webpages (link).

This reminds me that we are also organizing a Scandinavian Blood-brain Barrier Network (SBBN) symposium together with our Doctoral Programmes in Drug Research (DPDR) and Molecular Medicine (DPMM) on Thursday and Friday 19-20.1.2023, at the University of Eastern Finland at the Kuopio campus. The program is still very preliminary and I just got the websites up and running, so more information follows every week. Stay tuned and be there! 😍 The event is much smaller than this week's AD, but the topics and speakers will be superior: we will focus on "Brain Drug Delivery Methods &symposium Models to Study Brain Diseases" and the emphasis will be on the transporters, delivery of peptides, and how what is their relation in neurological diseases.

See more information from the SBBN-symposium 2023 websites (link).

NCCR Transcure Final Conference

I had an honor to visit NCCR Transcure Final Conference as an invited speaker last week. This was my first scientific trip outside Finland after COVID-19, and I must admit, I was pretty nervous about travelling. Luckily, Janne, my Ph.D. student accompanied me and we had a wonderful scientific trip together. It was such a great feeling to hear what others have been doing with transporters, discuss with people about the science and life overall and of course enjoy Bern, which I hadn't visited before. And although I always feel that transporters are a bit small field of science, this conference once again prove me wrong, it is a very broad field, perhaps not enough people and resources yet to do everything that is needed to be done. But after this conference, I felt, like always, full of enthusiasm to continue with my part. 😍

I'm also very proud of Janne's poster presentation, after all this was his first live science meeting during his Ph.D. studies and I'm super-proud that he was the other one of 2 students, who received the prestigious travel grant. 

If  you are more interested of the content of this conference and the transporter society in Switzerland, please visit these websites (link). 

Back to the School

This week the elementary school started and some of the activities at the university are already up and running. We have been lucky to receive our first exchange student for this semester, Soumeya from the University of Lyon, who actually visited us last autumn too. For this second time, Soumeya's internship will involve studies with our metformin prodrugs and currently she is also participating in writing our next metformin manuscript before we start our studies with cells.

Next week, we are also expecting to receive another student from France, Agathe from Grenoble University and bunch of other ERASMUS students later on during the semester. So I'm expecting to have a nice and multicultural autumn ahead of us and hopefully we will together create some new knowledge and understanding in our filed of science! I just realized that what an amazing view you will get when you end up doing your internship in Kuopio! 😎