The UCMR day 2021 took place last week in an online format. The meeting is one of the major local conferences at Umeå University, with over 200 attendees this year. It aims at bringing together scientists from the University working within microbial research and infectious biology, giving us the opportunity to see what other groups do and to network with our fellows. This year, Marta was part of the organization committee!
The event consisted of a mixture of keynote lectures, invited speakers, selected talks, an innovative online poster session and corresponding pitch talks. We had the opportunity to listen to Emmanuelle Charpentier who talked about her Nobel Prize work, as well as Stephan Pöhlmann with some exciting results on the processes leading to SARS-2 coronavirus entry and inhibition thereof.
We are very happy that our PhD student Konrad got the opportunity to present his work that was recently published in a talk that was well received by the audience. His first presentation to an external audience, great job!
Furthermore, several members of the group presented their work to the audience in 2-min pitch talks. Yara gave a clear and concise pitch for her iPoster entitled “Role of cell-surface glycosaminoglycans and viral glycoproteins in modulating virus binding and diffusion at the cell membrane”. Fouzia advertised enthusiastically her work on human papillomavirus. Lifeng told us about the role of APOE on herpes virus infection, with hope that we will one day understand better what causes Alzheimer’s disease. Hudson promoted his cellular taxidermy and sold his advanced biomimetic platform to the local crowd. Finally, our master student Marcel also had the opportunity to show first results of his project in our lab with his pitch and respective iPoster – “Influence of the Mucin-like Domain of the Marburg Virus Glycoprotein on Virus-Glycosaminoglycan Interactions”.
Overall, it was a very enjoyable event with exciting science, and we are already looking forward to the UCMR days 2022. Hopefully next time it will be on site and we will get a chance to meet, mingle and enjoy networking with other researchers in Umeå.
