PainLab on tour! All together for the first time

The Challenge of Chronic Pain – the first conference, which all PainLab members attended. The scientific meeting was held from 11th to 13th March in The Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, UK. Given the fact that there was a limited number of places and the conference had been fully booked months in advance, the participation in this event was a MUST for every “Pain Researcher”.

The one of a kind companionship of the Scientific committee formed by Jon Levine (University of California, San Francisco, USA), Stephen McMahon (King’s College London, UK), Cheryl Stucky (Medical College of Wisconsin, USA) and John Wood (University College London, UK) provided an excellent conference program and a real intellectual feast. Each of us presented our results during poster sessions, and as the total amount of posters was 40, we made up 10% of the overall posters’ presentations. Agnieszka, Magda and Mateusz were equally stressed as excited, after all, it was their debut on this kind of international event. They had to handle tricky and demanding questions and eventually they did extremely well. Afterwards, Natalia had a vigorous discussion with Marzia Malcangio, who was encouraging her to publish the results of her work in a high impact journal. Who knows, perhaps that scientific chat will result in a future collaboration. Attending the conference was a professionally rewarding experience for all PainLab members, especially for the youngest ones. Apart from listening to presentations and talking about science it was also nice to socialise with colleagues from other institutions. After the conference, we had an additional day in Cambridge before the return flight to Cracow and we couldn’t resist taking a look around this beautiful city. Luckily, we didn’t need any maps because we were guided by our colleagues from Poland who completed their PhD there. Thank you Łukasz and Ania! It was a great reunion of Jagiellonian University biotechnology graduates from 2001 till 2014. At the end of our scientific expedition we followed in the Watson’s and Crick’s footsteps and had lunch at The Eagle Pub – the most popular destination in Cambridge, where in 1953 W&C announced that they had “discovered the secret of life” and they had come up with their proposal for the structure of DNA. We couldn’t imagine a better place to summarise the bygone conference!