The 8th International USERN Congress and Prize Awarding Festival: Day 2

The 8^th international USERN congress entered its second day on November 9th. Today started with senior talks by Dr. Bruno Scarpa on comparison of UR-index, which is an index presented by USERN this year. Dr. Abass Alavi, had his key-note lecture on challenges and gratifications of academic life, and Dr. Alexander Leemans, Developer of ExploreDTI, had his lecture on mapping brain connections with magnets and diffusion of water molecules. This was followed by a junior talk panel with eight five-minutes presentations covering medical sciences ranging from animal studies to internal medicine and surgery. The subsequent junior talk panel focused on public health sciences, with a particular focus on COVID-19, followed by three other senior talks by Dr. Emilio Parisini on tackling future pandemics through international collaborations, Dr. Frank Sellke on effects of anti-diabetic drugs in myocardial function and perfusion, and Dr. Maha Al-Khaduri on PCO.

Meanwhile, in another hall, Prof. Tommaso Dorigo, Prof. Nima Rezaei, Prof. Alexander Leemans, and Prof. Frank Selke was sharing their experiences with the young researchers at “meet the expert” sessions.

The first panel of today was chaired by Dr. Sevan Iritsyan and Dr. Armine Hakobyan regarding the molecular immunology and allergology. The second panel chaired by Dr. Arsen Arakelyan and included keynote lectures by Dr. Hans Binder and Dr. David Goukassian, followed by a one-hour workshop on cancer genomics and bioinformatics. The session continued with a special two-hour panel regarding AI use in drug discovery and development chaired by Dr. Roksana Zakharyan and her colleagues.

The 5^th junior talk panel commenced after the launch break with a senior talk by Dr. Jianing Fu, USERN Prize 2022 laureate in biological science, on immune profiling of T cells in patients receiving lung transplantation. Dr. Amedeo Amedei and DR. Rossella Castagna also gave a senior talk on the microbiota-immunity interplay in human neuroinflammation and designing ligands for photopharmacology respectively. The Session included eight junior talks on immunological sciences. The final junior talk panel welcomed 12 young scholars presented their research on social sciences ranging from psychology to general socioeconomic sciences. In this session, Dr. Joseph Firth, winner of USERN Prize 2022 in social sciences, and Dr. Simon Rosenbaum delivered senior talks on Tackling health inequalities in people with mental illnesses and physical activity and mental health through the lens of the global refugee crises, respectively. Alongside the oral presentations, there were two poster presentations in which nearly 40 international researchers presented their research in medical, formal, physical, and social sciences.

The in-person part of congress concluded with two workshops. The first was a joint workshop on scientific publication by Prof. Nima Rezaei and Prof. Gonzalo Cordova, and the second focused on AI and was conducted by Prof. Tommaso Dorigo. The next three hours hosted nine virtual talks by international researchers.

The congress continues on its third day, tomorrow. Stay tuned for the upcoming events…