University of Minnesota Center for Immunology, Minneapolis

 

Julio Enrique Castañeda Delgado
Unidad de Investigación Médica de Zacatecas, Mexico
What can I say? It was an amazing experience in all senses. The city was great as well as the people I met. Maybe the most beneficial part of the course that directly had an impact in what I do, was to meet all these wonderful people that talked to me about their work and what they usually do. I am very excited by the increasing amount of information regarding all aspects of innate immunity and its regulation and how this is linked to the generation of the adaptive immune response. Dr. Stephanie Vogel addressed this issue formidably and I had some ideas from her talk that I am now writing for a project proposal. This particular talk improved my understanding of this aspect of immunology. I talked to several speakers and participants at the course and received an invitation to Flagstaff Arizona for a training visit in the laboratory of Dr. Fernando Monroy who works on intracellular pathogens. I met several students from the lab of Dr. Stefan Kaufmann and it was very nice to meet them because in my bachelor thesis I worked with tuberculosis and antimicrobial peptides. For my PhD, I am thinking to go back to tuberculosis biology, so meeting these students was just luck. Every one that I know that works with Tb has read at least one paper by Dr. Kaufmann.  So I am now in touch with these students and we are in continuous discussion of ideas.
I am making available to my labmates all the course material that was so beneficial to me. And I became part of a weekly meeting in my lab to discuss topics related to what I learned during the course. I am trying to make a contribution to my lab from this experience. Thank you very much for everything.

Benjamin Kagina, PhD Student
South African Tuberculosis Vaccine Initiative, University of Cape Town, IIDMM
Let me start by again thanking you and the sponsors for facilitating my participation in the 2010 AAI Advanced Summer Course in Minneapolis, Minnesota.   
Knowledge wise, I benefited immensely from the lectures. A lot of my previous personal immunology reading that was unclear was well clarified in the lectures. Interacting with other participants who work on diverse immunological projects was equally educative. It is a course that I would definitely like to attend again.

Joshua Muli Mutiso, PhD student
Kenyatta University, Nairobi, Kenya
The 2010 AAI advanced course was of high quality and very well structured and it offered me more than I actually expected. It addressed all questions within my research area and gave me the benefits I had set out to achieve from the course. The course dealt with many issues on disease pathogenesis and host-parasite interactions including specific host immune response to microbes and pathogen immune evasive mechanisms.
I got to know more about new parameters that a researcher can measure to determine vaccine candidate efficacy. I got to understand in depth, both the innate and adaptive immune responses to disease. New advances in immunology were addressed as well as their contribution to disease pathogenesis and their potential application in disease control.
I appreciated the kind of research that has been accomplished by individual and group faculty members in recent times. Finally, I take this opportunity to thank you very much for offering me a scholarship to attend the course.