RIMLS travel grant personal experience of Felicitas Pardow

"Thanks to the RIMLS travel grant, I had the opportunity to visit the AHR symposium in State college, Pennsylvania, US. The AHR is a ligand-activated transcription factor and the main molecule of interest in my PhD regulating the formation of the skin barrier (among others). I started my PhD shortly before the pandemic, so I didn’t get the in-person conference experience until this meeting and oh, what an experience.

The AHR scientific community is international but moderately small so to be in a room full with authors of your favorite papers was really stimulating. Meeting all those people in person and listening to them discussing each other’s work and sharing theories was an inspiring example for collaborations in science and created a real team spirit. Seeing them join for discussions at my poster was a nice acknowledgement for the good work we’re doing. Apart from that, despite everyone being focused on the same molecule but working in different tissues and different tissue contexts, it shows how enigmatic and multifaceted this seemingly simple transcription factor still is.

When socializing and going for food after a long day of scientific talks, I was able to make friends with other international juniors (and senior researchers who paid for the first round of drinks – setting an example to be copied). Since State College is a really small town, road tripping with my dear colleague Noa van den Brink from the airport to the conference was a really nice bonding adventure.

Big thanks to the RIMLS travel grant and the Radboud Internationalization grant for enabling this international collaborative experience and to my supervisors Ellen van den Bogaard and Jo Zhou for ice cream and their kind guidance."

Felicitas Pardow is a PhD candidate at the department of Dermatology, RIMLS. Her project is called 'towards the drug repositioning of Leflunomide for inflammatory skin diseases', and works in the lab on 3D models and on biological big data analysis.