But there is! And NICR is responsible for some of it. It is because the mission of the National Institute for Cancer Research includes not only top-quality research but also other specialised and educational activities, to use the vocabulary of project calls. But regardless of this (positively meant) hint at a formalised dictionary, the educational activities which experts at NICR develop both for the benefit of their own team and in the direction of both broader expert and general public, have a society-wide impact. Moreover, their perspective is long-term, and their ambition is to address the future generations of scientists whom we would like to inspire to take up an academic career.
In many areas of science, we are currently struggling with a decrease of interest in scientific work. Moreover, we are also aware of a relatively low general awareness of what science is actually for, what it involves, and how much it costs. To secure the future development of our areas of specialisations, we need to find, inspire, and motivate gifted juniors. Somewhat in-between the general and expert public are the master students, while Ph.D. students at the beginning of the doctorate enter – with more or less courage – the expert field. Summer schools clearly are among the events that can steer the younger students to science and reaffirm the older ones’ feeling that they are on the right track and equip them with further instruments to make their journey easier.
Experts from the NICR have so far organised two summer schools and participated with individual lectures in several more. It follows from the structure of the NICR, which has the form of a distributed network of top expertise across the republic, that the organisers and lecturers who participate in those summer schools are from universities, from various institutes of the Czech Academy of Sciences – as well as from leading foreign institutions. This is just another consequence of the growing internal connection among NIC teams and their internationalisation potential.
4EU+ Against Cancer
Our summer schools are inherently international not only in terms of lecturers but also students. The 4EU+ Against Cancer summer school, which took place last year in Marienbad and was organised primarily by colleagues from the Prague and Brno nodes of the NICR, was linked to the activities (and resources) of the 4EU+ European university alliance. That is also why lecturers included our colleagues from universities in Paris, Milano, and Heidelberg, with whom we have been collaborating also in our research projects. The school was intended mainly for master students in the relevant areas. In terms of subjects, it linked issues of tumour biology with basic information that has clinical relevance, especially in terms of treatment concepts in oncology. In the end, we have welcomed in Marienbad over thirty students from Czechia, France, Poland, Italy, and Germany.
Tumour Microenvironment and Immunity
For your doctoral students and early-stage postdocs, our colleagues from the Immunotherapy Laboratory of the Institute of Microbiology of the Czech Academy of Sciences have organised in collaboration with the team of the Institute of Anatomy of the First Faculty of Medicine of the Charles University and further invited lecturers from several countries a summer school called Tumour Microenvironment and Immunity. Almost forty young scientists from Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, and Georgia had arrived to the south Bohemian Nové Hrady and presented their research there in the form of posters. We are happy to announce that a summer school dedicated to the issue of tumour microenvironment and immunotherapy will take place, under the auspices of the NICR, this year again, towards the end of June, and we are already discussing next year’s summer school. This clearly shows that attendees of the summer schools appreciate them – both for their expert and learning aspect and for their networking potential.
Beyond the summer schools
The NICR is engaged also in other educational efforts. Our colleagues from the Prague node, in particular from the Institute of Anatomy of the First Faculty of Medicine of the Charles University in collaboration with lecturers from the Second Faculty of Medicine, BIOCEV, and the Faculty of Science of the Charles University had newly accredited a new optional subject for doctoral courses called ‘New directions in morphological research’, which focuses mainly on cell biology. Over thirty participants could thus learn, among other things, whether the increased incidence of tumours is a side effect of population ageing, how tumour cells migrate, how one can use tissue cultures in research and clinical purposes, or what genomic approaches are suitable for the study of human diseases.
We do not, however, forget also about secondary school students and their teachers. That is why we are now engaged – to varying extent in all NICR nodes and with the support of many of its research groups – in preparing events of the ‘visit the lab’ type. On top of that, we are trying to connect these activities with already existing programmes of the ‘secondary school academy’ type.
Naturally, we are well aware that all these educational activities place further demands on the time and effort of our scientists – and we want to thank them from the bottom of our heart for their collaboration and enthusiasm! Nevertheless, we believe that the energy put into these activities benefits the future careers of the students and is a good investment for us as well.
Aleksi Šedo, Director of the National Institute for Cancer Research