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Cardiorenal winter school 2020 - students perspective

Cardiorenal Winter School of the graduate schools SFB TRR 219 IRTG and Marie-Curie ITNs CaReSyAn and INTRICARE, Cardiorenal Retreat and Annual Meeting of SFB TRR 219.

February 5-7, 2020


This year´s graduate school was held in February 2020 in the conference hotel in Seeheim-Jugenheim under the topic of “Functional analysis of kidney-heart crosstalk” with the joint participation of the SFB TRR 219 IRTG and the Marie-Curie ITNs CaReSyAn and INTRICARE. With 15 postdoctoral researchers and 44 PhD/MD candidates it was a well-attended and highly productive event.


First scientific discussions and exchange already started on the joint outward journey predicting a highly profitable meeting.


As part of the organizing committee, we started working on the preparation of the meeting some months beforehand. That’s why we were very excited when the meeting started, hoping for a constructive, well-planned, in time meeting.


The graduate school began with an update on methodological knowledge for the analysis of pathological mechanisms and organ function, CKD animal models of CKD and cardiorenal disease and cutting edge technologies.


The individual scientific contributions of all participants were split into posters and rapid-fire talks. All participants successfully contributed to this concept which led to a varied and interesting program. During the poster session, PIs, postdocs and MD/PhD students from different graduate schools, research groups and countries discussed posters and scientific topics. “Having an open format at the poster session allowed us to have detailed discussions at our own poster or posters of similar projects, thus I got a lot of new ideas and constructive feedback for my project.”, was one opinion of a PhD student after this year’s poster session.


The rapid-fire talks challenged the presenters to show outstanding aspects of their projects in only 5 minutes followed by a 5 minutes discussion. One speaker of these rapid fire talks explained afterwards: “It was very difficult to condensate all important information I would like to give within a 5 minute talk, but as a listener during other talks I really liked these short talk format.” The poster presentations and rapid-fire talks were particularly useful for young scientists because they were able to get to know other students´ projects and discuss their own research field with other supervisors or like-minded PhD/MD students. By doing so, the participants gained a lot of ideas and input for their future experiments and planned to join forces and knowledge for research progress. Robert Dhzanaev, Ana Amaya Garrido, Maryam Amini and Bilal Mir were awarded for the best poster presentations and rapid-fire talks. Congratulations to the award winners!


The graduate school was concluded with a talk about research career development and went directly over to the cardiorenal retreat. Invented speakers gave outstanding talks about recent developments in multi-omics analysis, clinical trials as well as novel RNA-sequencing techniques and tissue engineering in cardiovascular disease. The last day of the meeting was exclusively for SFB TRR 219 members, were the latest research and future plans of all subprojects were discussed within the SFB consortium.


After the meeting we were very happy that it was such a productive event, but also very exhausted. It challenged us a lot, being an organizing team member and participant at one time. Everybody talked about science in between the sessions, as we did, but at the same time we tried to get everything prepared for the next session. At the end it worked out pretty fine for us and we hope, that all other participants enjoyed the meeting as much as we did.

Andrea, Fabian and Anika


Award ceremony for the best poster and rapid fire talk. Congratulations to Robert, Ana, Maryam and Bilal.

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