Post Travel Awardee Statements

The SGMS awards on a regular basis travel grants to students for national and international meetings. In this section, the awardees present a small report on their travel.

I had the opportunity to travel to Santiago de Compostela, Spain for the first on-site conference after the COVID pandemic. The Society of Hair Testing (SOHT) held their annual conference with help of the FORTOX group of the University of Santiago de Compostela for two days. The meeting is important for every scientist that works in the special field of hair analysis and is a great opportunity to deepen and broaden the knowledge about this topic. I did an oral presentation on my PhD project “Alterations of stress-related glucocorticoids and endocannabinoids in hair of chronic cocaine users” and got great feedback and interesting questions. Furthermore, I won the “Best Oral Presentation Award” from the SOHT for my talk. The conference was a full success, especially after this long absence of social interaction, the conversations, the networking and discussion about your own research field expanded my horizon and gave me great ideas and inspiration. I enjoyed listening to talks from my colleagues and learned a lot. I would like to thank the SGMS for the travel grant, which allowed me to travel to the conference and highly appreciated the support.

It was an honor for me to be awarded SGMS Travel Award allowing me to participate in Immuno-UK conference (London, 2021). The focus of the conference was on the topics related to immune-oncology, immunology, and inflammation. I was able to attend various talks from the immunology-oncology experts, which greatly expand my knowledge on different immune cell therapeutics, tumor microenvironment, and its role in cancer treatment. During the conference, I presented my research with the poster titled "Mass-spectrometry-based investigation of the impact of the nutrients on the cytotoxic functions of Natural Killer cells". I received positive feedback from many conference participants, which is extremely valuable for my research. This helped me to understand better the way my Ph.D. research project can be improved and its future directions.