FIBTRA Annual Meeting in Scandic Kuopio

We had this week the 6th annual meeting of Finnish Brain Tumor Research Association (FIBTRA) in Kuopio (Scandic hotel). We heard 11 fascinating presentations from all over the world, from Estonia, USA, Germany, Sweden, and Finland and from different areas ranging from basic biochemical research scientists and pharmacists, to neurosurgery, and medical physics. Of course it is a huge group effort always to organize these events, but also it is so rewarding to see the fruitful discussions and potential new collaborations that are initiated, not to forget all the new things and ideas that we all were able to learn and take home with us. I would like to thank all the group members for helping me out with organizing the event, but also all the funding sources and sponsors who make the event possible! Here are some sneak-peak photos from the event, but I'm sure more will follow afterwards.

New coffee room wall & fairwells

We have a great new painted wall in our coffee room! Thanks for Tiina, our technician and her skills! 😀 I think the original plan was to have also the structure of the most important ingredient written in the wall, so I look forward to seeing some chemistry on the wall too! 

We also were gathered to have a fairwell of Amandine, who is now returning to France. Since almost everybody were bringing something to table, we had a really nice multicultural afternoon coffees. Anyway, thank you Amandine for your hard work and great results, it will be interesting to continue from here! And it was a great summer for all of us to have the students in house.

Great start for the semester

I think now all of us are pretty much back in business. It has been a great week to see, how much we have achieved despite the summer holidays; new molecules, massive data to dig, great feedback from journals (yes, the revisions for your manuscripts comes always during your holidays...), nice write-ups for the upcoming manuscripts, great new ideas, etc. etc. We have also already received the first visiting students from Thailand this week, so welcome Vej and Thanavit! It is always great to see the learning process and the massive enthusiasm of new "beginners". 

But above all, we also recently received great news with our former postdoc Sema, as our Review paper with a title "Metformin derivatives - Researchers' Friends or Foes?" (link) was accepted to be published in Biochemical Pharmacology. And the best news is that Sema is coming back to work with us, at least for a short while. There are also all kind of great things happening during the autumn semester, so I look forward to work and celebrate our achievements with you!