Final-Conference-Report-Chen

Conference reports

School of Life Sciences Newsletter

9th European Zebrafish Meeting, Oslo Norway, June – July, 2015.

I would like to thank the School of Life Sciences for providing me the opportunity to present my research at the 9th European Zebrafish Meeting in Oslo Norway from June 28 – July 2, 2015.

The conference was attended by two thousand people from all over the world who are at the forefront of zebrafish research. The program included four keynote presentations by Professors Ewan Birney, Rainer Friedrich, Leonard Zon and Laia Ribas that were particularly stimulating. In addition, twenty plenary talks, 78 short oral presentations and hundreds of posters provided ample opportunity to choose relevant subject areas. Workshops and strategic discussions were also on offer, overall covering recent scientific breakthroughs in functional genomics, developmental biology, biomedicine including disease models, toxicology and drug development. Moreover, the 9th EZM draw attention to zebrafish and medaka as models for aquaculture related research.

Particularly memorable were the keynotes ‘Finding Therapeutics Using The Zebrafish’ presented by Prof. Leonard Zon from Boston Children's Hospital (US), and the plenary talk ‘Decoding the Molecular Cues That Regulate HSC Specification’ by Prof. David Traver from University of California at San Diego (US), which presentations discussed similar mechanisms of recruitment and signalling pathways directly relevant to my project, providing insights into research areas in my field and valuable experience for me to present my own work. Best of all was that I had the opportunity to discuss my research about ‘Redundant function of Def6a and Swap70b regulating cell movements during epiboly independent from non-canonical Wnt signalling’ with internationally renowned researches and I received valuable advice that will help in my future studies.

The conference venue offered great social events too including the welcome reception, an invitation to the Oslo City Hall by the Mayor, and a dinner in the Oslo’s Opera House. I particularly enjoyed my evening walks around the harbour after long hours of talks.

Overall, it was a conference that combined high level of science in a condensed manner, and yet provided an enormously comfortable and relaxing environment to indulge.

Chen Chen

3rd Year PhD Student

Supervised by Fred Sablitzky