Oh happy day! Today Jana defended her PhD thesis. She presented her work and answered comprehensively to all the curious questions of her committee members Matthias Hammerschmidt, Aleksandra Trifunovic and certainly Matteo. So we could finally reward her with a fantastic PhD hat. Matteo seemed to be quite happy to add his first PhD student to the pool of PhD graduates 😉 Her work on astroglial mitochondrial fusion proteins and their important role upon brain injury is published on the preprint server biorivx. Check it out: Göbel et al. 2019

Esther, Sandra and Gulzar travelled to the Glia 2019 to present her scientific work on stem cells and astrocytes. This year the conference took place in Porto, a nice harbour city at the atlantic ocean which is famous for their port wine 😉 Matteo joined after the conference started to grasp as well the most important new findings of our colleagues in the glial field of science. We are already looking forward to the next GLIA conference in Marseille, France in 2021.

The Matteos participated again at the Unilauf 😉 the refreshing beer after a 5 km run at a pretty hot summer day is well deserved.

Before

After 😉

… same procedure as every year – Weiberfastnacht breakfast“ with the 4th floor of the CECAD building followed by the legendary party in and by Oliveri’s. Kölle Alaaf 😉

Matteo invited us to a joint retreat in Cambridge hosted by the lab of Benedikt Berninger. Thanks again for the warm welcome. Scientist from the Christophe Heinrich, Sergio Gascon and Marisa Karow lab participated as well. The broad interest in adult neurogenesis, stem cell research, cellular reprogramming, glia and mitochondrial physiology put together a very interesting set of talks. Due to visa issues and pregnancy status 😉 the Bergami lab started reduced in number but with a very good mood to an exciting 3 day trip to the UK.

group picture of all participants

Esther, Sandra & Kristiano

beautiful CAMBRIDGE

tasty traditional food 😉

sightseeing in LONDON

sightseeing in LONDON

must do – tasting traditional drinks 😉

sightseeing in LONDON

self explaining to kids of the 90ies 😉

selfie time – Matteo, Kristiano, Sandra & Esther

Lined up at the Rhein 😉

Lined up at the Rhein II 😉

Kristiano & Vignesh

Watching hippos

Vignesh & Gulzar

well deserved barbeque

We headed to Heumarkt after a joint breakfast to meet at noon a guide for the city-rallye we booked in advance. We were looking forward to solving riddles while moving through our city cologne… BUT were disappointed by the guide who showed up 1 hour late and was not informed about the necessity to perform everything in English. We cancelled and decided to go the famous Zoo 😉 so we still walked quite a bit and closed the day with a well deserved barbeque.