VLAG FLASH - November 2009, Edition 25
Twenty-four PhD candidates with 8 different nationalities, covering the broad range of nutritional science on the cellular, individual and population level, participated in the 2009 edition of the PhD-tour from the division of Human Nutrition. We visited eight universities and institutes in three Nordic countries; Denmark, Sweden and Finland. It was a great opportunity for us to increase and strengthen our knowledge in nutrition research and related areas. In addition, the tour enabled us to broaden our scientific network.
Monday 19th of October we started our scientific programme at the University of Copenhagen. The main topic of this day was sensory science and we had two interesting key-note lectures from Prof. Kees de Graaf about slow foods and regulation of food intake and from Dr. Jean-Philippe Chaput about sleep, mental stress and obesity. We closed the day with a fantastic diner sponsored by FOOD (the Danish "VLAG").
The next day we stayed in Copenhagen and visited the Technical University of Denmark. Scientists at this university had a lot of expertise on food composition databases and dietary assessment methodologies.
Unfortunately we had to leave Denmark on Wednesday to travel to our second destination: Sweden!
On Thursday we visited the university of Uppsala. After a warm welcome at the department we were guided through the old city to the Gustavianum, the oldest university building of the city (1620). One of the main topics this day was the effects of fatty acids composition on different diseases. We ended the official program with a visit to the anatomic theatre in the building, which was a central stage for dissections in the old days. However, networking could be continued during our diner at one of the student societies, which absolutely surpassed the quality of a ordinary student menu.
On the last day of the fist week we visited the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. In the morning we were welcomed at the Unit of Preventive Nutrition within the Department of Biosciences and Nutrition, where we discussed integrated strategies of physical activity and nutrition to promote health. After lunch we crossed the city to visit the Department of Nutritional Epidemiology where we heard about challenging results from a variety of epidemiologic studies ranging from the effects of cadmium, alcohol and fish intake to the effects of Vitamin D accumulation through sunlight.
After a relaxing weekend in Stockholm we continued our programme in Kuopio. The School of Public Health and Clinical Nutrition participates as well as our nutrigenomics chair in the NUGO collaboration. Therefore, during this day there was specific attention for potential gene-diet interactions. In addition, Dr. Toni Travis introduced us to the bio-information application NBX black box. Of course we couldn't leave Kuopio without the experience of a real Finnish smoke sauna and a freshening dip in the lack.
Our last stop was Helsinki. First we visited the University of Helsinki where we had fruitful discussions during the presentations as well as during lunch-time, and the cheese and wine poster session at the end of the day. The day after we visited the national Public Health Institute of Finland (THL). During the day we discussed the implications of findings from scientific research for practice, which is a great challenged. We closed the day with a discussion about women and their ambition for becoming a professor in the future and the difference in attitude between Dutch and Finnish women. On our last Friday we visited the R&D department of the company Valio, where, among others, the Vice President Research professor Riitta Korpela gave a presentation.
We can look back to a fantastic trip. We thank the hosting institutes for their great hospitality and our sponsors for making this trip possible. We warmly welcome PhDs from the Nordic countries to visit Wageningen.
You can find the complete scientific programme of our tour, including the abstracts of all presenters, at our website:
http://humannutrition.phdtour2009.nl
Best regards,
PhD-tour committee 2009
Sanne Griffioen-Roose, Sandra Crispim, Cécile Povel, Michel Joosten and Rianne de Vlaming
