Skills Award Report Sam Ballak ISOTT 2014 London
Thank you very much for making it possible for me to attend the ISOTT 2014 conference in London. It was a really important opportunity to develop my academic skills.
The topics of oxygen, muscle and exercise in combination with ageing are very important for my third and fourth chapter of my thesis. I was glad that a session was focused primarily on these topics on Sunday morning (29th of June). Even though the methods used in these studies were fairly new to me, the topics were interesting.For example there was a talk about the influence of exercise intensity and inspired O2 on muscle deoxygenation. In my research I focus on hindlimb muscles in rodents. Also here the Gastrocnemius Medialis was studied. It was good to learn that the oxygen saturation decreased when the exercise intensity increased. This was new for me and may have applications for my research in muscle ageing and exercise.
Another interesting topic was the keynote lecture about Oxygen transport after altitude training and Epo doping. This is not a topic directly related to my current research topic, but may broaden my perspective on muscle physiology and hence increase my career prospects. The key point of this lecture was that altitude training does not help as much as many scientists and athletes believe.However if an athlete thinks that he is gaining from such a training, that alone is a reason to implement such a training period, even though it is a placebo effect.
Of course the most important part of my visit was my mini-oral and my poster presentation about the validation of a new semi-automated method to study capillary domains. The mini-oral was allowed to be no longer than 2 minutes. First I thought this would be easier than a normal oral presentation, however, when you only have 2 minutes, it is even harder to focus and tell only the important bits. I practiced a couple of times and therefore I was confident that I was able to give a short, focused but interesting mini-oral. Indeed, the mini-oral went like I thought, because I practiced. I always feel that practicing the presentation is a key thing to do, which helps me to further develop my presentation skills on a genuine platform.
Afterwards, it was time for the poster presentation and during a 1 hour time slot some people who heard my mini-oral came to me to have a talk with me about the poster. I remember one lady in particular who knew a lot about this method. She was quite critical, but in a fair way, because she first did not understand why this was needed, because these calculations already exist. Only when I explained that we hope to fully automate this whole procedure and this was the first, but necessary step in that process, she understood. She gave me some advice to use fluorescence staining for both the capillaries and myosin heavy chains in the future,to better discriminate the borders between the fibres and capillaries. This would allow a computer program to better discriminate between all features in the picture, hopefully indeed making this method fully automated in the future.
It was nice to have this discussion and to feel that I was able to discuss my topic on a scientific level, with a senior scientist whom I did not know.
All in all, I am really glad that I was given the opportunity to go to this conference. Without the funding it wouldn’t have been possible.
Best wishes, Sam Ballak, MSc.