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 was awarded the SGMS Travel Grant to attend the American Society for Mass Spectrometry (ASMS) conference in Houston, Texas, which was held 4th to 8th of June 2023. The conference provided an outstanding platform for scientific exchange and the dissemination of cutting-edge research in the field of mass spectrometry. 
I was allowed to present our research, entitled “Structural studies on somatostatin and octreotide in the presence of copper ions by means of FRET and ion mobility spectrometry”, as a poster at the conference. It allowed me to showcase our work to a wide audience and receive feedback from mass spectrometrists of different backgrounds. The poster session provided an excellent platform to discuss my findings, methodologies, and potential applications, opening doors for future collaborations and also scrutinize my research in different ways. 
In addition to the conference event, I also participated in the “Native mass spectrometry” short course prior to the main event. Lectures held by renowned scientists in the field of native mass spectrometry provided practical knowledge and skills reaching from fundamentals to applications, i.e. membrane proteins or data analysis softwares, equipping me with valuable tools to advance my research. 
I would like to thank the Swiss Group for Mass Spectrometry for their financial support to seize this valuable opportunity. 

This year I had the chance to present my research at the annual conference of the American
Society of Mass Spectrometry (ASMS, 2023) with the support of the SGMS travel award. I got the
chance to present my recent work focusing on the structural characterization of amyloid-β and its
non-covalent complexes with copper and a neuropeptide-based metal chelator, which sparked a
lot of discussions concerning the gas-phase studies of such disordered systems.
The conference covered a wide range of topics, from fundamentals to unconventional
approaches in mass spectrometry and the oral and poster presentations were diverse and highly
educating. On the instrumentation front, the incorporation of various dissociation methods in high
resolution instruments seems to have created a new and exciting path for native top-down
proteomics. Additionally, it was highly interesting to familiarise with new ion mobility spectrometry
(IMS)-based technologies, such as structures for lossless ion manipulation (SLIM), expanding the
range of potential applications. Other highlights included the structural characterization and
sequencing of membrane proteins by use of vesicles and barcoded nanobodies and fast laser
heating to probe the thermal stability of complex matrices.
I also had the opportunity to attend a short course on native MS with a focus on sample
handling, ion mobility fundamentals and applications to structural biology. The course was very
informative and introduced novel approaches and ideas to be explored.
All in all, this conference expanded my knowledge and gave me the chance to have fruitful
conversations and exchange ideas that can broaden the scope of my future studies. I am very
thankful to the Swiss Group for Mass Spectrometry for providing me with this opportunity.

The SGMS travel award allowed me to visit the 71st International Congress and Annual Meeting of the Society for Medicinal Plant and Natural Product Research (GA) taking place at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland. The conference took place throughout three consecutive days and I had the opportunity to present my work as a poster. In my work, we used an ambient ionization source coupled to mass spectrometry to produce characteristic MS spectra from natural products. These spectra were further used to train classification models for enhanced quality control.

The conference covered a variety of topics such as new analytical methods for natural product analysis, metabolomics, pharmacognosy, machine learning and AI. All topics focused on identifying novel medicinal therapies inspired from nature. 
Attending the conference allowed me to build connections, discover new methodologies and enabled a very diverse exchange with researches coming from 53 countries. After attending and being able to discuss a variety of topics with other attendees of the conference, I feel inspired to tackle challenges in my own work with a different approach. 

I would like to thank the SGMS for their generous contribution. Without the support through travel grants, attending such conferences would be a lot less accessible to PhD-students. The in person scientific exchange is irreplaceable and I greatly enjoy the personal as well as academic development that these conferences provide. 

Last but not least, I’d like to express in the spirit of the Irish that the conference was the craic!