Nordic EMBL Partnership Meeting 2023 Helsinki
The Nordic EMBL Partnership annual meetings strategically connect Nordic- and EMBL-based researchers on a mutual basis. These events facilitate expansion of knowledge through scientific presentations and break-time discussions, while also providing opportunities to broaden networks and spark future collaborations.
Over 200 participants travelled just outside of Helsinki to Aalto University’s main building, Dipoli, for the meeting. The building’s organic architecture, once a radical design trend, set the ideal atmosphere for nurturing collaborations that will push the boundaries in addressing current challenges in molecular medicine.
Apart from members of the host node, FIMM, members of the other three nodes – Danish Institute for Translational Neuroscience (DANDRITE), The Laboratory for Molecular Infection Medicine Sweden (MIMS), Centre for Molecular Medicine Norway (NCMM) – and EMBL participated.
Over the course of the meeting, 30 Nordic EMBL Partnership, EMBL, and guest scientists introduced their research to the audience. The event programme also featured round table discussions, flash talks and poster sessions, forging connections among the participants at all levels. Around 70 scientific posters were presented during two interactive poster sessions.
The scientific presentations were grouped into five sessions within the themes of “I) EMBL and Nordic EMBL Partnership, II) Multi-omics and precision medicine, III) Data-driven approaches, IV) Advances in neuroscience, and V) Emerging imaging technologies”. In addition to the research presentations, the annual event provides a platform for the node directors to deliver updates on the progress of each node to the broader community.
Introducing a fresh concept for the Partnership meeting this year, tandem talks showcased cutting-edge technologies that facilitate research collaborations across the nodes. These connections have been strongly supported by the fact that the Nordic EMBL Partnership has served as an Infrastructure Hub since 2021, when the Partnership was awarded funding from NordForsk to help increase knowledge transfer and interactions across the Partnership.
Four examples highlighted successful cross-node collaborations on gut microbiota and metabolomics (MIMS-FIMM), long COVID (FIMM-MIMS), Zebrafish model for neurological diseases (DANDRITE-NCMM), and phenotyping rare neurological disease variants with high content analysis (NCMM-FIMM).
This year’s meeting featured two additional programme components that took place just before the main meeting, on 11-12 September. The 2023 Young Investigator Meeting (YIM) embraced the theme of “Sailing into the unknown: building bridges and forging collaborations”. The second component was the half-day Group Leader satellite workshop. Its primary emphasis was knowledge sharing and identification of new collaboration opportunities.
The meeting was opened by Professor Ewan Birney, Deputy Director General of EMBL and Director of EMBL-EBI. He addressed the current EMBL Programme 2022-26 ‘Molecules to Ecosystems’, which aims to understand ecosystems at the molecular level, thus studying life in its natural context. He also discussed how well this resonates with the mission of the Nordic EMBL Partnership.
“It’s great to host our friends in the Nordic countries here and from the rest of Europe as well, and hearing about the cutting-edge research work,” said Samuli Ripatti, Director of FIMM. “I think at the end of the meeting, we will go home and think about how to do things together and how to utilise the novel information we got.”
“The group leader meeting is basically giving us an opportunity to network with each other, and it is also giving us practical advice regarding ERC funding and what are the career choices you need to make. So, this is very helpful. What brings me here is the opportunity to network with a lot of people,” said Anne-Marie Fors Connolly, Clinical Research Fellow at MIMS.
“It’s been good to meet with the other group leaders, who are at different stages of their career, to get some quick advice,” said Thomas Kim, who recently joined DANDRITE as a new group leader. “I’m getting a new idea of what to do and how to organise my lab. I think collaboration, which is a theme for this year, is a good take-home message.”
