Travel Grant Winner Oleh Lushchak Attends Molecular Biology of Aging Conference in Groningen, Netherlands

After 10 years of virtual collaboration, Oleh finally met Professor Steve Simpson at the conference

I would like to acknowledge the US-Ukraine Foundation for the possibility to attend my first big meeting dedicated to aging. This story started with an event held in Kyiv where all winners were awarded travel grants to participate in a conference or training course. As far as I know, it was first ever event where so many people were awarded such an amazing possibility.

This award made possible my participation in the 3rd Molecular Biology of Aging Meeting held in Groningen, The Netherlands. Over 500 participants presented their research related to aging.

The model organisms varied from single cell yeast to dogs or humans. All the talks were related to nutrient sensing, telomeres and genome stability, epigenetics, organelles and ageing, cellular ageing, cellular senescence, protein homeostasis and stem cells. For every session two leading scientists of the topic presented their latest work. All the participants had the opportunity to present their posters during the entire meeting to provide ample opportunity to meet and discuss with their colleagues.

Especially for me it was a possibility to meet in person people whose research I have followed for many years and also to learn about new aging-related researches. It was a big pleasure to meet Professor Steve Simpson, who is known for introducing the term “nutritional geometry.” We have collaborated for the last ten years and even published five papers together but never had the possibility to meet - until now! We discussed many crazy ideas and designed the experiments to test them.

Oleh Lushchak and Professor Steve Simpson

Moreover, I met other researchers interesting in collaboration. For example, Dr Georges Janssens from Amsterdam has agreed to perform metabolome and lipidome analysis for our project.  He is looking for varied compounds to extend the lifespan of roundworms. We agreed to test his top candidates in our lab using Drosophila.

Again, I thank very much the US-Ukraine Foundation, the sponsors and the committee for such a possibility. It is important to feel myself part of the world scientific community.

-Oleh Lushchak, Associate Professor, Vasyl Stefanyk Precarpathian National University

You can read about Oleh's laboratory here: Scientists in Ivano-Frankivsk tackling age-related diseases and deforestation.

 

 

CONFERENCE POSTER