Our SmartAge ESR13, Bram Nap from University of Galway, Ireland does one of his secondments at Chritian-Albrechts-University in Kiel, Germany.
Kiel University (CAU) was founded back in 1665. It is Schleswig-Holstein's oldest, largest and best-known university, with 27,000 students and around 3,700 members of staff. It is also the only fully-fledged university in the state. Seven Nobel prize winners have worked here. CAU uses research, teaching and the transfer of science to address the great challenges of our time in health, environmental and cultural change, nutrition and energy. (source: uni-kiel.de).
The work Bram carried out in Kiel University at the Institute for Experimental Medicine under Prof. Dr. Christoph Kaleta, could be split into two parts. Firstly, he worked on the Trend cohort, a cohort of people who are at risk of Parkinson's disease. Metabolic modelling efforts were continued from Stefano Flor’s work during his secondment in Galway. Together they also applied machine learning methods to the vast amount of data generated to try and see if they could identify the effects of the gut microbiome that could decrease the probability of developing Parkinson’s disease. On the other hand, Bram helped out by facilitating and explaining the creation of human-microbiome models and helped with various small projects.
Besides the science, Bram visited the lighthouse “Leuchtturm Kiel-Holenau”, a German submarine in Laboe, had to take a dip in the Kieler Fjord and walked around Kiel’s many different parks.