Senior Researcher Irina Borodina organized the course, and the two weeks lab exercises where performed with help from Senior Researchers and CO-Principal Investigators Helene Faustrup Kildegaard, Tilmann Weber, and Michael Krogh Jensen, as well as Group Leader and Senior Researcher Morten Nørholm.
“It has been very educational for us to have the students. They were all extremely dedicated and interested in cell factories,” says Helene Faustrup Kildegaard.
Small groups was a good idea
The students were divided into 5 teams of 3-4 persons and shifted between the different labs. In this way, the instructors in each lab had the opportunity to get a close connection to each student and give everyone careful instructions.
Helene especially liked the social bonds the students got and how that effected the course.
“They had fun together, but were also kind of competitive. They really wanted to succeed in this! We even got some interesting results, that we haven’t seen before. In the end most presentations at the exam where really good,” she says and continues:
“And it was fun to see how they got a ‘relationship’ with the cells. Some even referred to their cells as pets, that you have to nurse, which was kind of amusing.”
A lot of scientists and lab-assistants at the centre have been involved in the Course, which will most likely be repeated next Summer.
So what did we learn?
“Everything went very smooth, so basically we will only adjust minor things for next year. But some of the students asked for more hands-on with computational modelling, because they were really interested in predicting pathways before going to the wet labs. So we might consider including more computer modelling in the course next time.”