UCMR Day 2024 and welcome Laura!
On Thursday January 18 2024, it was again time for the UCMR Day. UCMR stands for Umeå Centre for Microbial research. It aims to foster interdisciplinary collaborations among 10 different departments across Umeå campus, to master the complexity of microbial infections.
The day started with a big change: Marta officially took over as Deputy Director of UCMR from Teresa Frisan, while Fredrik Almqvist took over the Director position from Yaowen Wu. In her acceptance speech, Marta pointed out how impressed she was by the quality of the research carried out within UCMR, when she attended a UCMR day on her third workday in Umeå. She wants to help to keep up this level of excellence, and we are sure she will. Congratulations on the new position Marta!
Two keynote speakers graced the event. In the morning, Peijun Zhang (Nuffield Department of Medicine, Oxford University) gave an impressive overview of new cryo-electron microscopy technologies that are being developed at the national top facility she is director of. Also, she showed fascinating results, among other, how the genome of HIV-1 travels all the way into the host cell nucleus before it is unfolded. At the end of the day, Maria Lerm (Linköping University) showed many interesting ways in which microbial infections can leave behind epigenetic signatures, for example, how long-COVID is distinguishable from COVID-19 without long-lasting symptoms.
Many young researchers presented their work in poster presentations, poster pitches and short talks. Gosia, Fouzia, Sarah and Dario had a poster to represent virology research. Moreover, Sarah gave a poster pitch, while Dario gave a short talk. Especially the poster pitch session was well liked by the conference participants: everyone managed to stay well within the 3 minutes allotted time, while also seducing people into coming to their posters. Two people from our department of Clinical Microbiology won a best short talk (Elin Palm) and best poster (Emelie Backman) prize, respectively. Congratulations!
Just like last year, the UCMR day provided a first taste of the open and collaborative microbial research environment, to a student who just joined our lab: Laura Salinas Ruiz-Castillo, a student of Molecular Biology at Umeå University, joined the group in the same week as the UCMR day. She will work with Dario for the coming months, on single particle tracking of Corona virions on live cells. Welcome Laura, and good luck!