CIG Progress Reports 2023-2024

Each speaker presents their work in 20-25 min + 5-10 questions.
For more dynamic discussions, we usually interrupt speakers with questions during the talk. The aim is to share your work with your colleagues and receive scientific feedback.

Please keep in mind that the CIG is very diverse and many of your colleagues are not familiar with details of your field and specific methodologies. Thus, we advise you to balance the amount of presented data against the time you have to present. 

Optional feedback on presentation skills using a questionnaire By popular demand, but only if desired, presenters can receive tips from a couple of PIs to improve presenter skills. For this, we prepared a feedback questionnaire to be filled out together over a brief discussion at the end of the seminar.

BIG SEMINARS 2023-2024

Every first Monday of the month 12h15,
Auditorium Biophore Building
UniL-Sorge at Dorigny

Free entrance

BIG is an interdepartmental seminar series, and is organized by Zoltan Kutalik, Julia Santiago, Yolanda Schaerli, Tanja Schwander and Nadine Vastenhouw

October 2, 2023
Stefan Mundlos, Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics, Berlin (DE)
Structural Variants in the Non-Coding Genome – Lessons from Development, Disease, and Evolution

November 6, 202
Tatiana Giraud, University of Paris Saclay (FR)
“A new theory for the evolution of sex chromosomes, based on deleterious mutations

December 4, 2023 Cancelled
Rong Fan, SEAS, University of Yale, New York (USA)
Title to be announced soon.

January 8, 2024
Ted Farmer, DBMV, University of Lausanne (CH)
“Electrical signalling in insect-damaged plants”

February 5, 2024
Jochen Rink, Max Planck Institute for multidisciplinary sciences, Göttingen (DE)
“Planarian regeneration: A mechanistic/genomic/evolutionary perspective”

March 4, 2024
Susana Coelho, Max Planck Institute for Biology, Tüebingen (DE)
“(A)sex in the rockpools: the private life of brown algae”

April 8, 2024
Verena Ruprecht, Center for genomic regulation, Barcelona (ES)
Nucleus mechanotransduction and cellular morphodynamics

May 6, 2024
Gosia Trynka, Open target & Wellcome Sanger institute, Cambridge (UK)
“From GWAS to function: interrogating biology at scale to contextualise gene function”

June 3, 2024
Nick Lane, University College London (UK)
Title to be announced soon.

Call for applications to the “PIs of tomorrow: The Future of Swiss Research” – Deadline Oct. 15, 2023

The PIs of tomorrow session at the next LS2 Annual Meeting 2024 will be held in Lausanne, 14-15. February 2024

This session offers to postdocs interested in an academic career an opportunity to present a plenary talk similar in format to a professorship interview seminar. A knowledgeable jury panel of professors will evaluate the presentations.

The best presentation will be awarded a prize. However, everyone is a winner, as all presenters in the session will receive feedback from the jury in a one-on-one private session afterwards. Moreover, as a participant in the LS2 Annual Meeting 2024, you will have the opportunity to expand or refresh your network in Switzerland via interaction with scientists in and outside your field.

Only applicants having ties to Switzerland will be considered (i.e. Swiss citizenship, Swiss residency, past or on-going affiliation with a Swiss institution of at least two years by the 2024 meeting). Independent position holders are not eligible.

Find the full list of eligibility and selection criteria and details to apply in the document hereunder.

Deadline: 15th October, 2023

More information: https://annual-meeting.ls2.ch/2024/specials/pis-of-tomorrow

Questions to the session should be addressed to postdocsession@gmail.com. We are looking forward to your application and hope to welcome you in February 2024 at the LS2 meeting!

General questions can be sent to info@ls2.ch

Career Chat on 12th of September at 18:00 at Irchel Campus Y03-G85 and online – organized by LSZYSN

Five panelists will discuss about opportunities, challenges and experiences in life science startups:

  • Martyna Wroblewska, Manager Innovation and Sourcing at BaseLaunch
  • Dr. Simon Bredl, Founder of Trojan Therapeutics
  • Dr. Gabriel Leventhal, CSO of PharmaBiome
  • Dr. Joshua Jordi, CEO of EraCal
  • Dr. Christian Jost, Co-Founder and VP Early Partnering of Athebio

Don’t miss this opportunity to get first-hand insights into life science startups and get to know the speakers at the apéro after!

Registration via: careerchat.lszysn.ch

Martyna Wroblewska is a Manager of Innovation & Sourcing at BaseLaunch accelerator. BaseLaunch works with scientists and entrepreneurs and helps them build exceptional biotech ventures from scratch, by providing convertible loan financing, access to partners (Roche, J&J, CSL Behring, CMS, Roivant Sciences, BridgeBio, and Pureos Bioventures), and drug development expertise. She studied at the University of Zurich, and before joining BaseLaunch in 2021 worked for a Zurich-based biotech start-up as a Project Leader, where she was responsible for the design, development, and management of projects focused on oncology and vaccine development.

Simon Bredl is in the process of translating his cell based immunotherapy into the startup Trojan Therapeutics. Simon has a background in immunology, virology and molecular biology, with an interest in synthetic biology. After his Postdoc, he worked as a scientist for Redbiotec AG in Schlieren and was part of their success story. At the moment, Simon is working on monocyte-based immunotherapy, comparable to CAR T-cell therapy, for immunological cold, solid tumors.

Gabriel Leventhal is the Chief Scientific Officer of PharmaBiome, an ETH spin-off that is developing multi-strain bacterial consortia to treat diseases linked to the gut microbiome. Gabriel is originally a physicist and a mathematical biologist by training, but has been working in microbial ecology for the last 10 years. Following a postdoc at MIT, he returned to Switzerland to join PharmaBiome and push their mission of developing targeted microbiome live biotherapeutic consortium products.

Joshua Jordi has led EraCal as CEO since its inception. He is a biochemist from ETH by training and completed his PhD in physiology at UZH. Joshua invented EraCal’s foundational platform technology as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. EraCal was founded as a UZH and Harvard University spin-off in 2018 and aims to fight excess weight and obesity as the most widespread health risk globally by developing a novel drug candidate to reduce appetite.

Christian Jost is the co-founder of Athebio and studied DARPins and their biotechnological potential for nearly 10 years in an academic setting. He then extended his knowledge towards pharmaceutical drug development and became a Senior Scientist at Roche-Glycart. With his expertise from both academia and industry, Christian connects the biological ideas and needs of their Pharma partners with the possibilities of Athebio’s Athebody® DARPIn technology.

Farewell Thomas, Justine and Enrico!

We bid farewell to Dr. Thomas Auer and his lab members, Justine Pascual and Enrico Bertolini, who have moved to the Department of Biology at the University of Fribourg on September 1st.

We wish them all the best in their new group at the University of Fribourg!