T/A teambuilding

Info
Newsletter for the department of
Experimental Medical Science
editor:
anna.appelberg@med.lu.se
Emma Widvind from Räddningstjänsten Syd educating BMC staff. (BMC reports that the fire drill
April 19th went very well - but next time save a student on your way out!) Photos: Hans Hovenberg
Anna-Lisa Rosenberg scholarship
The 2009 scholarship will be shared between the projects “Peripheral regulation of
trangene expression in the brain” (Tomas Björklund), and “In vivo analysis of alphasynuclein intercellular transfer as a novel pathogenic mechanism in Parkinson’s disease”
(Elodie Angot & Jennifer Steiner). Each project is awarded 40,000 sek. Congratulations!
EMV Department board update:
The 620 000 sek strategic proposal was accepted on the Monday board meeting.
Youtube and other movieclips on your homepage
It’s now possible to embed links to youtube in eZ. Anna Appelberg has instructions.
This is timely, considering the recent launch of Lund University’s own youtube channel.
Study plans & courses
Keep track of your PhD student study plan! Study plans after 50% and 75% entitle you
to a pay rise! The last application day for PhD fall courses is May 20.
Governement bill - utbildningsproposition
The vice-chancellor invites you to a seminar on the bill May 6th. (Sign up before May
4th.) To read the bill itself (Swedish) click here.
Vacation Planning
For professors, senior lecturers, “forskarassistent” and PhD students, the vacation is
registered automatically according to the LU collective agreement, ie you will get all
your vacation planned out during summer. If you have other plans on when to have
vacation, please contact Lisette Eklund before April 30th.
Want to use the Aperio ScanScope?
The undergraduate-education scanner for microscope samples “Aperio ScanScope LRi”
can be used for research for a start-up fee of 5000 sek per research group.
A mandatory introductory course hosted by LRi instruments is
800 sek/person. Please contact cecilia.holm@med.lu.se or
karin.berger@med.lu.se if you are interested.
© Michiko Mori
All floors in the A-house will be evacuated and locked
one or two weekends in June as a precaution when the
MRI equipment on floor A09 is disinfected using lethal
hydrogen peroxide vapor. As soon as the weekend(s) are
decided you will be notified.
Kristoffer Ström (standing).
April
2010
T/A teambuilding
Pentathlon
About 35 of the technical and administrative staff
visited the Science Centre “Vattenhallen” on the
T/A team-building day April 15th. This is an account of the events.
After a lovely walk over to LTH, Amanda Haux from
Vattenhallen started out with welcoming everybody.
She introduced the facility and explained that the
name derived from when the building was full of water and the staff preoccupied with waves and different
constructions of docks and quays.
Nowadays the purpose is to attract potential new
students to the natural sciences. “If you have any ideas
about medical experiments, we are very interested,”
Amanda Haux invited us. “The students always appreciate when they come across phenomena that are useful
in the society.”
Children visiting Vattenhallen get to build their own
flashlight and stand inside a gigantic soap-bubble, but
Amanda Haux had a surprise in store for us: Pentathlon. [Swe: femkamp] We were divided into groups.
As members of team number one, we started out with
the T-puzzle. From oddly shaped planks with sharp
angles we had four minutes to construct the letter “T”.
Increasingly desperate, we finally finished by 03:55.
Birgit decided to throw all caution (and L-dopa?) out
the window. She raced through the maze as fast as she
could, touching left and right, but finishing with a
competitive score. Her group cheered!
Next stop was ultra-sound. The task was to figure out
the content of several large jars. Jar number one was
pregnant with a dinosaur. Jar number two, three and
four were also easy, but when we got to the fifth jar we
were out of time again. “It’s a squirrel!” Gudrun Kjellander decided to take a last-minute chance. Group
number one wasn’t doing so well, but we all laughed at
Gudrun’s determination.
At station four, no one remembered “V=(4 π r 3 )/3”
but everyone remembered Archimedes, so we were
good to go.
For the “shake-test” Birgit Haraldsson got loud ovations. The task was to move a handle in a narrow slot
shaped like a maze as fast as possible. If the handle
touched the sides of the maze the clock raced.
At station number five we were provided with an
empty three-liter bucket, an empty five-liter bucket
and big bucket of eight liters that brimmed over with
water. The task was to distribute the water so that
the big bucket ended up with only four liters. Group
number four exceled at this and won the pentathlon.
“The buckets are definitely where the victory was
won,” concluded team four’s Angelica Håkansson.
Anna Appelberg
Britt-Marie G Nilsson, Birgit Haraldsson, Eva Jansner and Eva Ohlson.
William Agace
on the big prize
William Agace recently made a publication very few scientists
get into. The gossip magazine Svensk Damtidning.
The reason is a prestigious award. And princess Madeleine.
http://svenskdam.se/2010/04/prinsessan-madeleine-var-stralande-vacker-pa-prisutdelning/
How would you summarize your feelings around the Göran Gustafsson prize?
“It’s fantastic. This is something that has been built up over a
long time by the current and the previously members of the lab.
They have done a superb job. When I came back from Stockholm
we had some champagne and nibbles. This particular prize comes
with a bunch of grant money. We have other grants that run out
at the end of the year, so it’s perfect timing. I think our group is
a nice example that one can actually do good, innovative science
outside of major centers. It should be an eye-opener to the politicians,” William says.
“We were running around all over the place. The first thing we
had to do was a press lunch. I had to give a ten-minute summary
of my research in English, and I think that went pretty well. And
then Vetenskapsradion, the scientific radio newsdesk, wanted to
interview us. For some reason they chose the two non-swedish
scientists... My wife and our friends told me that it was fine,
and were very supportive. My kids on the other hand, tease me
so much about my Swedish that it doesn’t exactly build up my
self-esteem. I haven’t been able to listen to it afterwards,” William
smiles. “After that we got into a taxi and I had to go back to the
hotel and put on tails and a white tie [Swe: frack].”
William’s group works in the area of mucosal immunology and
focuses primarily on the gut. The human gut has a very large
surface area, about 300 square meters. There is a huge number of
bacteria living in the gut.
And how did that feel?
“It was fine. I’ve learned my lesson. When I got another prize a
few years ago I hadn’t brought the shiny glistening shoes. I had
my old black shoes which were all scuffed and had holes in the
soles that I was unaware of. There we were, sitting up on this
stage, the three of us. No! And you had to show the soles of you feet!
This time I made sure to rent a pair of shiny shoes too.
“The immune system would threaten our health if it continually
reacted to every bacteria or everything we eat, so there’s something very special about the environment in the gut that allows us
to somehow tolerate foreign material continually. There are many
pathogenic bacteria, viruses, fungi and nematodes that actually
use the mucosal surfaces as a site of entry, and cause disease. So,
at the same time we need to be able to respond to those kinds of
pathogens and activate an appropriate immune response to get
rid of them.”
“Crohn’s disease and Ulcerative Colitis are treatable, but not
curable. They certainly have an impact on the morbidity in the
population. Worst-case scenario one needs to be operated to
remove pieces of the gut.”
Do you think there ever will be a cure?
“If we can further understand the mechanisms that regulate
immune responses in the gut in general, and the main cellular
players that drive immune responses, there is a good chance that
we will be able to at least treat these patients more effectively.
Ideally in a tissue-specific manner, so that we dampen the immune responses at mucosal sites specifically and not the immune
responses in general.”
Which part of what you do do you think was of interest to the prize
committee?
“I think two or three findings: the mechanisms of how t-cells
get out into the intestinal mucosa. We’ve really been one of the
pioneers in determining this. The second is that we’ve contributed in a major way to understanding how these gut tropic t-cells
are generated. The third thing is that we’ve provided important
new insights into the subsets of antigen presenting cells (dendritic
cells) in the intestinal mucosa and their potential roles in modulating mucosal immune response.”
Why don’t we go into the award ceremony itself– what were you
impressions?
Princess Madeleine is quite a dish [Swe: pudding]!
“She is pretty.” William pauses. “But I was `stilig´ too!”
Did you get star struck?
“I don’t follow the royal family, and probably a year or so ago
could not have told you who she was, so; no. But Christer
Fuglesang was also there, all full of medals. He seemed nice. But
perhaps not as pretty...”
‘There’s a personal part of the prize money as well – any plans for
that?
“I have three kids. It will disappear into the family spending.
Seven months down the line when I won the other prize I remember sort of asking `where’s all the money gone?´”
victims
Photo: Nasa
Ash Cloud
Share your ash-cloud story with Emilia Heimann, Christine Berggreen, Malin Parmar, Anders Björklund,
Eva Nordin, William Agace or Deniz Kirik: they will have a story to match yours...