Successful digital completion of BMED904
BMED904, the Graduate Course in Extracellular Matrix, was this year run jointly with the DIKU Summer School in Fibrosis, June 7-11, 2021. This was the first time the course was held through a digital platform, a bit of a challenge as parts of the course are lab based
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CCBIO PI Donald Gullberg is academic responsible for the course together with Professor Marion Kusche Gullberg, assisted by group members Mona Grønning and Ning Lu. 19 students were registered for ECTS participation, while 35 non-ECTS participants joined for professional updates. One of the lectures was also highlighted as a CCBIO Seminar with speaker Andrew Leask, attracting around 50 participants. All in all, people joined from different parts of Nor-way, and from Sweden, Denmark, Finland, UK, USA and Canada.
See the complete program here.
“We are by now used to digital meetings and conferences,” Donald Gullberg says. “It was nevertheless new to us to include practical lab training in a digital format,” he continues. This was solved by filming the lab work, and cells were also sent to a collaborative group in Canada, who filmed the microscopy work.
18 international speakers from Scandinavia, UK and North-America contributed. Donald Gullberg was surprised that so many were willing to do their talk live, not to miss out on the questions from the audience. One of the speakers even joined live from San Francisco at 4 in the morning.
Gullberg finds it important to facilitate contact between academia and the corporate world. “In 2019, we hosted a DIKU financed conference on fibrosis in Bergen, and noted an interest from sever-al enterprises. We then included speakers from biotech companies in Europe and Australia,” he says. “This year, we included a startup company in Toronto (Ronen Schuster, Phenomic, and a listed company in San Francisco with an interest in integrins in fibrosis (Martin Decaris, Pliant Therapeutics),” Gullberg explains.
The next BMED904 is planned for the spring term 2023.
