Short-term fellowships

The graduate students and the scholarship holders have the possibility to obtain short-term fellowships to visit other laboratories.

example:
Sebastian use the short-term fellowship to go to Bristol:

My name is Sebastian Guhr and I am a medical student working on my doctoral thesis on glomerular parietal epithelial cells (PECs) of the kidney at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf.

Our group established a new isolation technique to get PECs from rat kidneys and we also performed morphological and biochemical analysis. However we never had the chance to apply this method to human tissue in Hamburg.

Prof Moin Saleem and his team of Bristol University in England have much experience in isolating and immortalizing cells from human tissue. We established a cooperation and I was invited to apply our isolation technique to human tissue in Bristol.

The visiting researcher programme by the Integrated Research Training Group of SFB 877 gave me the opportunity to obtain a short term fellowship to visit Prof Saleem and his lab group in Bristol and implement our new isolation technique on human tissue. I stayed there twice in March and May 2011 for 2 weeks each and working with Saleem’s group helped me expand my interdisciplinary and scientific skills. This helped me improve my understanding of cell culture and working with primary cells not only from human but also from other tissue. Finally we established a new human PEC cell line which will be a new baseline for upcoming research!