Photoreport from the PhD Conference of the IEM CAS 2024

In connection with the uniqueness of this event, we also welcomed invited VIP speakers, including Petr Baldrian (President of Czech Science Foundation), Ondřej Slabý (President of Czech Health Research Council) and two former postdocs of the IEM CAS – Josef Horák (postdoc from the National Cancer Institute in Washington, US) and Jiří Růžička (project manager of the i&i Prague Bio-Innovation Center). At the end of the VIP section, Josef Uskoba, the representative of the main conference partner Biotech a.s. (open in a new window), gave a presentation about a new solution – Fida Biosystems. Due to illness, the famous and renowned Czech populariser Pavla Hubálková had to cancel her participation at the last minute. However, she has promised to organise a special popularisation workshop for our students, a gesture that we deeply appreciate.

The conference programme was full of exciting lectures. During the three-day conference, 38 Ph.D. students presented their projects, seven of them in the poster session, which took place on the last day of the conference. In total, we welcomed 102 participants, including our students, postdocs, junior and senior researchers, lab heads and members of the International Advisory Board (IAB) of the IEM CAS.

The IAB members even took on the challenging role of evaluating the best presentations. The content of the individual talks was of high quality and equalled the quality of presentations at major international conferences. It was very difficult for the committee members to select the three best speakers for this year’s conference, who were:

• Anda Cimpean (Department of Neuroregeneration) – Autophagy in axonal growth and regeneration of adult sensory neurons
• Tomáš Knotek (Department of Cellular Neurophysiology) – Astrocyte-like subpopulation of NG2 glia shares features with neural progenitor cells
• Kristýna Tomášová (Department of Molecular Biology of Cancer) – Telomere length as a predictor of therapy response and survival in patients diagnosed with ovarian carcinoma

The awarded students received financial support of 30000, 20000 and 10000 CZK, which they can use to cover their travels abroad, whether to international scientific conferences, summer schools or national and international professional courses.

The award for the best poster presentation went to Erika Hudáčová (Department of Developmental Biology), who presented the project “Single-cell profiling reveals the role of Meis2 in transcriptional regulation of osteogenesis during craniofacial morphogenesis“.

This year, the organising team decided to include also a new competition category called the Microscopy Art Competition, which Barbora Smejkalová (Department of Neuroregeneration) won with her image “Spinal Space“.

The final part of the conference was a social evening, which offered a rich accompanying programme and was a great opportunity for informal and professional discussions and for students from all departments to meet each other. We would like to organise another similar event in two years, and we hope to welcome many new and talented PhD students to our institute by then.

The full photo gallery can be found on our Facebook (open in a new window).

Thanks to our sponsors

We are immensely grateful to our commercial partners for their generous sponsorship, which played a crucial role in the success of this event.

We extend our heartfelt thanks to our main partner, BioTech, as well as to Thermo Fisher Scientific (Life Technologies Czech Republic), East Port Prague, Pragolab and Schoeller Instruments. Your contribution has made a significant difference in supporting the young generation of scientists at the IEM CAS, and we deeply appreciate it.