Mislav Basic, Doctoral Researcher Representative (PhD Council) at DKFZ German Cancer Research Center, shared on LinkedIn:
“Not a typical working week last week.
Instead of writing code and analysing data, I spent three days (October 14–16) at the bootcamp of the Fontana Seed Fund Collaboration Challenge at the DKFZ German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg.
The challenge supports early-career researchers in building international, cross-institutional collaborations in cancer research.
It started with more than 140 researchers forming teams, and 32 teams from 19 institutions submitted grant proposals.
Patricia Marqués González, and I were selected as one of the finalist teams with our project, ‘Dissecting the Interplay Between Transcriptional Ageing and Epigenetic Plasticity in AML Response to Decitabine plus ATRA.’
I’m very grateful that this challenge connected me with Patricia Marqués González, from Karolinska Institutet.
Her expertise added an ageing perspective to my PhD project that I wouldn’t have explored otherwise.
At the bootcamp, all finalist teams took part in grant-writing workshops and pitch training to strengthen our proposals ahead of the final evaluation.
For me, the highlight was Ringrose Leonie’s grant-writing workshop, where we assessed our own proposals using the actual reviewer guidelines. A real eye-opener!
It was also great to exchange ideas with fellow finalists from The Institute of Cancer Research, the The Netherlands Cancer Institute, the Weizmann Institute of Science, Karolinska Institutet and many more. I hope some of these conversations turn into future collaborations.
My sincere thanks go to the Fontana Foundation for funding this initiative, and to the DKFZ Cancer Research Academy for an excellent organisation, especially Prof. Duncan Odom, Mariana Schulte-Sasse, Samira Fischer and the whole team.
Fingers crossed for the final selection!”
Other articles about DKFZ German Cancer Research Center on OncoDaily.
