Novartis Campus: Short Term Scientific Mission by COST

I wrote about the International Imaging Mass Spectrometry Conference (OurCon 2012) elsewhere. The conference took place in Spain at the beginning of September and during the course a small “contest” was announced. The aim was to briefly propose a project concerning the mass spectrometric imaging, which would be realized European research departments of choice with appropriate equipment. Five contestants were rewarded the financial support of COST organization to realize the mission.

I found myself caught be the quantification in mass spectrometry imaging, as it fuses my scientific experience from Pharmaceutical faculty at Charles University and from AMOLF. Luckily enough, one evening I was sharing the dinner table with Dieter Staab, the direct co-worker of Markus Stoeckli at Novartis in Basel, Switzerland. Research in different areas is carried out there and the mass spectrometric imaging group was involved also in quantification projects. When Dieter asked “So, who is interested to come to Novartis?” I did not hesitate a second with my “I am in!” answer. Then things happened quickly: we came up with a brief work-plan and following day I was chosen with other four people for the scientific mission. I started to look forward to an experience from labs of leading pharma company in Europe.

Being at Novartis now, I am taking the advantage to learn the state-of-the-art approaches of the mass spectrometry imaging, learning new laboratory protocol, knowing new people and creating new contacts. Moreover I appreciate the opportunity to learn how research in a pharma-industrial lab is carried out. I can compare with academia (Charles University) and research institute (AMOLF).

 
P.S. The COST organization supports the students and scientists not only through various educational activities, but also through Short Term Scientific Missions (STSMs). The idea is to enable sharing the research laboratories and equipment in Europe. It comes in handy when you want to support your publication with additional data, which cannot be acquired in your lab because of lack of suitable instruments. Or when you have an interesting scientific question, which cannot be answered from the very same reasons. Or when you just want to learn something new. More on STSM can be found here.