Missed our symposium at IUIS 2025? We had the privilege of hearing from five outstanding scientists who brought together a truly global perspectives – here are some of the highlights:
Keynote presentation: Luciana Balboa (Argentina)– shared her career path and her challenges into breaking into the field of tuberculosis researcher as a young researcher from South America and how she navigated and established fruitful international collaborations.
- In her research program, she explores metabolic regulation of macrophages in TB patients
- She further shared the challenges of the current scienticide in Argentina and how this impacts reseachers in their ability to remain productive particularly given costs for laboratory reagents and publishing fees in international journals
- This further led to a discussion on how we assess research productivity and what it really means to be “competitive” in today’s research landscape
- She then shared her work with the Global Young Academy and a recent publication in Nature on how researchers worldwide are evaluated for promotion to professor level positions and how difference apply between different settings
Keynote presentation: Ayman Oweida (Canada)– Ayman’s abstract was the only abstract among over 2000 abstracts submitted to IUIS that mentions radiotherapy.
- He presented his work on radiotherapy and immune resistance mechanisms, particularly in patient cohorts in his institute of in head and neck squamous cell carcinomas
- His work showed several avenues of immune regulation of therapy resistance including Treg depletion and CCL2 modulation
- His talk was a great example on how to to move research from lab bench to patient care and back and running both, basic discovery research and clinical trials
Selected abstract presentation: Tal Pecht (Germany)– Tal took us along on a story around the three most important questions to any project: When? Who? What?
- she share her research which examines the connection between urbanisation, diet, genetics and immune health with a focus on diabetes and cardiovascular disease in sub-Saharan Africa
- You are what you eat – fueld metabolomic changes – she and her team are studying diverse diets in Tanzania and their results highlight how nutrition shapes immune status and long-term health, one of her main focus areas is also on sex differences of immunity and health
- she also highlighted the fact that „Great science is rarely a solo act“ and the role of community involvement
Selected abstract presentation: Eugenio Contreras Castillo (Mexico)– Eugenio presented his research on regulatory T cell biology in inflammation and infection models and possible regulatory roles for TIF1γ and β-catenin.
- He also introduced Open Box Science, a non-profit promoting science democracy, which is a free and remote opportunity for researchers to organise talks and present their work
- Further, he reflected on the unique challenges of doing science in Mexico
Selected abstract presentation: Sue Tsai (Taiwan/Canada)– Sue shared very personal insights on her pathway to becoming a research group leader in Canada, from being born and raised in Taiwan where she set the goal of becoming a ‘BMOB’ (‘Be my own boss’) to relocating to Canada and spending her teenage years in Vancouver, to becoming an independent group leader
- She highlighted her diverse research experiences working with algae to ribosomes before focusing on obesity and immune cell development
- She beautifully reminded us that “science and art are not so dissimilar.” and to stay optimistic and seeing challenges as opportunities
Throughout the session, common threads emerged: collaboration, resilience, and imagination. Our speakers underlined the role of innovation and creativity when facing challenges, the value of diverse perspectives, and the power of harnessing collaborations to overcome scientific or personal challenges. Together, these talks reminded us that science is not just about data and experiments, but also about the systems, environments, and people behind it.
A huge thank you to our speakers for their courage to share both their science and personal stories. I also want to thank our wonderful chairs and organisers Drs. Lee-Hwa Tai and Adeleye Adeshakin for all their upfront work and a wonderful session moderation. Lastly, we want to highlight Miltenyi Biotec for sponsoring travel grants and cash prizes for our speakers – and of course the plushies!
