On Friday 24 November, the 1st DCEXS-UPF Students' Symposium took place, which was sponsored by the company LabClinics and the ChichaLimoná restaurant, and that counted with the support of the PhD Programme in Biomedicine and the DCEXS-UPF through the María de Maeztu program.

The event started with a guest lecture on the mutation and DNA repair processes in cancer by Núria López-Bigas, former DCEXS researcher and current principal investigator at the Research Institute of Biomedicine of Barcelona (IRB). At 11:00 am, the Symposium gave way to the collaborative poster session, which occupied the rest of the morning, and during which the students themselves, organized into eight groups, chose the one they considered the best poster of each group.

The afternoon kept going with presentations by the students whose posters had been selected, and ended with a guest lecture by the head of the DCEXS Translational Synthetic Biology group, Marc Güell, who gave a talk about the application of the application of gene editing technologies in synthetic biology, which would precede the revelation of the winning team of the award for the best of the eight lectures in the afternoon.

A total of 77 doctoral students from the DCEXS took part in the collaborative poster session, in which the participants were divided into eight different groups. Each group had to choose a poster and present it to the public in a maximum time of fifteen minutes. These were the selected works:

• Curie Team: Cyclooxicienase-2-dependent cerebellar neuroinflammation affects fine motor coordination in the monoacylglycerol lipase knockout mice
  Sara Martínez, NeuroPhar
• Franklin Team: Identifying penetrance modulators in heritable pulmonary arterial hypertension (HPAH)
  Pau Puigdevall, Functional Genomics
• Goodall Team: XRN1 links transcription, translation and decay
  Leire Campos, Virology
• Lovelace Team: Awakening the dormant beauty: how to study HSC in vivo
  Laia Traveset, Immunology
• Margullis Team: Inhibition of cancer cell proliferation by a novel regulatory mechanism that renders RB insensitive to CDK inhibition
  Maria Caballero, Cell signaling
• McClintock Team: H2O2 signalling through one- and two- component redox relays
  Alba Domènech, Oxidative stress and cell cycle
• Meitner Team: The role of Glutamatergic CB1 cannabinoid receptors in the phenotype related to resistance to eating-like behaviour
  Laura Domingo, NeuroPhar
• Salas Team: Influence of glucose limitation on TH17 effector responses
  Sonia Tejedor, NFAT proteins and immune cells

A scientific committee composed of postdoctoral researchers from DCEXS-UPF chose the Meitner team as the winner, who had selected a poster focusing on the role of cannabinoid receptor proteins in eating disorders. Laura Domingo, the author of the poster and who made the winning presentation, was awarded with the attendance to a scientific congress, while the rest of the team was awarded with Amazon purchase vouchers. After the award ceremony, the students concluded the day with a beer session.

It is the first time that the PhD students at the DCEXS-UPF organize this kind of symposium. "The symposium has been set up to encourage two aspects that, as PhD students, we consider essential in the career of a scientist", comments Héctor Huerga, one of the organizers of the Symposium. "On the one hand, the need to remember the motivations and illusions that led us to choose this profession and that we can lose sight of as the pressure to produce results and publish increase. On the other hand, it underlines the importance of sharing knowledge to create synergies and bring benefits to the community". Undoubtedly, the 1st DCEXS-UPF Students' Symposium has served to showcase the quality and diversity of the research carried out by the doctoral students of the DCEXS-UPF, also providing them with an opportunity to practice and improve their communication skills with colleagues who work in other disciplines in the field of life sciences.