News from Conferences

STI at the 5th European Congress on Tropical Medicine and International Health

The STI and GWE project leaders played a key role delivering key note addresses, chairing, and organizing sessions of the 5th European Congress on Tropical Medicine and International Health, from 24-28 May in Amsterdam. Marcel Tanner spoke on North-South research partnerships, presenting the experience and approach of the STI in fostering the development from field sites to project sites and field research centres in the South.

Tom Smith was a keynote speaker and chair of a session on mathematical modelling for disease control, as were Mitchell Weiss in a session on health-related stigma, and Jürg Utzinger in a session on schistosomiasis epidemiology and control.

Jakob Zinsstag chaired a session he organized on the health of nomadic pastoralists, with several collaborators participating, including Bassirou Bonfoh and Anna Münch, who won the “Young Tropical Scientist 2007” Award for her work on “The meaning and representation of illness, health and health services among the Kel Tamasheq in Northern Mali”.

The STI at the "Living Together" Meeting

From June 13th – 16th 2007 a larger delegation of the STI attended the 1st Three Countries Joint Meeting under the title ‘Living together’ of the French Society of Parasitology, the German Society of Parasitology and the Swiss Society of Tropical Medicine and Parasitology in the beautiful city of Strasbourg. Caroline Kulangara, Ingrid Felger’s PhD student, gave an interesting and appreciated talk about her project to select new malaria blood-stage peptide vaccine candidates. More STI PhD students presented their work on posters, which were frequently attended and discussed during the poster session. One of the meeting highlights was the talk by Cornelia Spycher, a former PhD student of Hans-Peter Beck, who received the SSTMP research award 2007 for her thesis ‘Characterization of the novel Maurer’s clefts protein MAHRP1 in Plasmodium falciparum’. The meeting covered a broad range of topics from basic molecular research to medical case reports and ecology of parasites. For all participants, this was very useful and inspiring.

Claudia List

Sonja Schöpflin