On Friday, May 31, the third IDIBAPS PhD Day was held, organized by the PhD Community, the community of pre-doctoral researchers at IDIBAPS, in collaboration with the institution. It took place at the Paranimf of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Barcelona, with 134 people attending in person.
The day began with a welcome from Elías Campo, director of IDIBAPS. Following this, Meritxell Teixidó, CEO/CSO of Gate2Brain S.L., and Xavier Rovira, Junior Group Leader at IBEC, gave a talk on the importance of knowledge transfer in research.
Afterwards, three workshops were held:
- Sustainable science by Donate Weghorn, group leader in the Bioinformatics and Genomics Programme at CRG.
- Personal branding by Maria Guillot, medical writer and scientific communicator at Simbionte.
- Scientific illustration by Isabel Loureiro, illustrator and scientific infographer in Biomedicine and Natural History.
In the afternoon, a round table took place where Anna Bosch, General Manager of the European Foundation for the Study of Chronic Liver Failure (EF-CLIF), Bea Aguilar, immunohematology manufacturing specialist at Grifols, and Laia Rosich, medical advisory technician at the Catalan Health Service (CatSalut), discussed the pros and cons of different career paths after the PhD.
Additionally, there was a poster session and the “Thesis in 3 Minutes” competition. This year, 27 posters were submitted, of which 20 were selected, and 10 oral presentations were given. The jury consisted of Cristina Fillat, Dolors Colomer, Silvia Affò, and Marco Sanduzzi-Zamparelli. Michela Bertero and Eduard Guasch assisted in evaluating the abstracts for poster selection.
The winners were as follows:
Poster Awards:
- First Prize: Marc Moro Buendia. Principal Investigator (PI): Azucena Salas. Title: Unveiling Microanatomical Domains in Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) Tissue through Spatial Transcriptomics Analysis.
- Second Prize: Ignacio Roura. PI: Carme Junqué. Title: Functional connectivity disruptions are associated with non-motor symptoms in patients with Isolated REM Sleep Behavior Disorder.
- Third Prize: Silvia Ariño. PI: Pau Sancho-Bru. Title: Needle biopsy-derived liver organoids enable alcohol-associated liver disease modeling and drug response.
Oral Presentation Awards:
- First Prize: Jesús Daniel Gómez Zepeda. PI: Neus Agell. Title: KRAS phosphorylation at Ser181 regulates secretome protein composition and therefore, cell invasiveness in colorectal cancer.
- Second Prize: Ian Márquez Gómez. PI: Elías Campo. Title: Timing the origin, early diversification, and evolution of Richter transformation in chronic lymphocytic leukemia.
- Third Prize: Maria Ros. PI: Patricia Pérez-Galán. Title: Dual CD-19 FRβ CAR-T to counteract tumor microenvironment immune suppression in follicular lymphoma.
The day ended with a recreational activity at the cloister of the Faculty of Medicine of UB.
The first edition of the PhD Day took place in 2019. This third edition of the IDIBAPS PhD Day has been a career activity aimed at promoting the professional development and social interaction of the institution's R1 researchers. This action is part of the current Action Plan of the Human Resources Strategy for Researchers (HRS4R).
