International Symposium 2018

GRK2162 Symposium “Neurodevelopment and CNS vulnerability”

Our first international Symposium “Neurodevelopment and CNS vulnerability” took place in September 2018. We were enormously glad to welcome so many excellent speakers from all over the world. Fred H. Gage (Salk Institute, USA), winner of the Jakob-Herz-Preis of the medical faculty of the FAU and one of the absolute top-class researcher in our research field, gave the key note lecture on Wednesday evening. All speakers and members of the GRK were then invited to a welcome dinner at the Gerberei organized by the Department of Molecular Neurology (university hospital, Erlangen).

On Thursday and Friday, we experienced intense and inspiring days of excellent talks by prestigious scientists like Victor Borrell (CSIC Alicante, Spain), Denis Jabaudon (Université de Genève, Switzerland), Gaia Novarino (IST Vienna, Austria), Tobias Böckers (University of Ulm, Germany), Hans von Bokhoven (Radbound UMC, Njimegen, Netherlands), Francesca Peri (UZH, Zurich, Switzerland), Ileana Hanganu-Opatz (UKE, Hamburg, Germany), Melanie Meyer-Lühmann (University of Freiburg, Germany), Klaus-Armin Nave (MPI for Exp. Medicine, Göttingen, Germany), Leda Dimou (University of Ulm, Germany), André Fischer (DZNE, Göttingen, Germany), Sebastian Jessberger (UZH, Zurich, Switzerland), Hongjun Song (University of Pennsylvania, USA), Verdon Taylor (University of Basel, Switzerland) and Guo-li Ming (University of Pennsylvania, USA).

All sessions were chaired by our GRK students and associated post-docs.

Three of our GRK students were elected to give short talks during the symposium. Every GRK student was furthermore assigned to one speaker to “chaperone” him or her to make the speakers feel welcome and get the chance of intense networking and project discussions.

During lively and interactive poster sessions, many new collaborations and ideas were established and exchanged and our students were thankful to receive valuable input for their projects.

Self-made cake by the students for the coffee breaks and gorgeous weather contributed to create a very pleasant atmosphere inviting all participants to socialize and start new collaborations.

We were very happy to receive so much positive (and even enthusiastic) feedback and that our students, participants and speakers experienced the symposium as truly inspiring.

Last but not least, we would also like to thank our sponsors Celgene, Novartis, Roche, Janssen, Miltenyi Biotec and Development for the generous support of our symposium.