At the end of January 2023, the first face-to-face SmartAge Winter School took place at our beneficiary Christian Albrechts University in Kiel (CAU), Germany, in which 11 of our 15 ESRs could participate. In addition to numerous scientific lectures, the diverse program on "System Biology and Metagenomis" also included a training course from our partner organization Qiagen and various workshops.
On the first day the participants were welcomed by Professor Christoph Kaleta and his SmartAge ESR Stefano Flor. The two were the hosts of the Winter School and had organized the event. After the welcome session, Dr. Maik Goth from Dortmund gave an interactive workshop on Mental Health and Stress Management. In the evening, well-coordinated teamwork of our ESRs was required: In small groups it was necessary to successfully complete an escape room. On Tuesday, current and former members of the CAU working group "Medical Systems Biology" gave lectures on topics such as System Biology, Metagenomics and metabolic microbiome-host interactions. Professor Andreas Dräger from University of Tübingen gave a keynote lecture on "Systems Biology file formats – Microbiome of the respiratory tract" at the end of the day.
On Wednesday, Dr. Dominic O`Neal and Dr. Leif Schauser from our partner organisation Qiagen conducted a full-day workshop on how to use the CLC Workbench. On Thursday Dr. Yorgos Marinos from Christian Albrechts University Kiel gave a course on "Modelling bacterial communities" in the morning and Professor Johannes Hertel from University of Greifswalf in the afternoon a course on "Statistics applied to deterministic models". In the evening, all participants met for a joint dinner in the "Kieler Brauerei".
On Friday, the last day of the SmartAge Winter School, Cyrille Thinnes and Bram Nap from our beneficiary University of Galway, Ireland presented their project results and gave the participants an brief introduction in metabolic modelling. This ended a week full of scientific lectures, exchange and networking. We are pleased that our SmartAge ESRs have continued to grow together as a team and were able to take home many new ideas for their projects.
Many thanks to Christoph, Stefano and the whole working group "Medical Systems Biology" at CAU for hosting us and who made the meeting a success.