Left to right: Romuald Binet, Jasmine Murdoch-Vilaplana, Maria Kyriazi, Loren Kell
On the 18th-19th March, we held the fourth symposium for the Young International Cell Senescence Association. The International Cell Senescence Association (ICSA) was originally founded as European Cell Senescence Association in 2012, aiming to bring together scientists working in the senescence field from all around Europe. It was soon expanded to ICSA, with great interest in the field from the entire world. Considering the strong enthusiasm of young scientists, the organisation decided to then expand to Young ICSA (yICSA).
yICSA provides early career researchers with a platform to share their research, create networks and bridge collaborations across countries. We therefore had the delight of hosting their 4th annual conference at Oriel College. We met 100 researchers from over 15 countries to discuss their new discoveries in the research area of senescence, spanning the fields of ageing, cancer and more.
The symposium featured six oral presentation sessions for students and postdocs, two poster sessions, guided tours of Oxford and prizes for talks and posters. We also had the honour of hearing from two keynote speakers, Dr Marta Kovatcheva (IFOM, Milan, Italy) and Dr Satomi Miwa (Newcastle University, UK), who shared their expertise and advice to the incoming research generation.
The symposium was organised by Loren Kell and Maria Kyriazi, both DPhil students and current Mellon Longevity Scholars at Oriel College, Dr Romuald Binet (Experimental Project Manager, MRC, and ICSA secretary), and Jasmine Murdoch-Vilaplana (Visiting Research Associate, King’s College London). Both Maria and I work on senescence and the biology of ageing in Dr Ghada Alsaleh’s Lab at the Botnar Institute, and Professor Lynne Cox (Biochemistry Department and Fellow at Oriel College).
Since registration for the conference was free, the support of our sponsors for this event was completely invaluable. Our sponsors were BLAST, Juvenescence, Altos Labs, ICSA, Oriel College, and Merck.
Overall, the symposium featured brilliant presentations, and showed that the future of the field is in good hands, and looks bright and promising!
