SpaceLife Doctoral Candidate Yueyuan Hu was awarded a poster price at the National Radiobiology Conference GBS2011

Luna Hu at her award-winning poster after the GBS2011 conference
The SpaceLife doctoral candidates Arif Ali Chishti, Yueyuan (Luna) Hu, Petra Schwendner and Kristina Koch took the chance to present their latest results at the annual conference of the Society of Biological Radiation Research (14. Jahrestagung der Gesellschaft für biologische Strahlenforschung, GBS2011). They were also involved in the organization of the conference, as the Cellular Biodiagnostics Group, lead by Dr. Christa Baumstark-Khan, and Dr. Günther Reitz (Head of the Radiation Biology Department of the Institute of Aerospace Medicine, German Aerospace Center - DLR, Cologne), had the honor to form the local organizing committee for the GBS2011. In a successful collaboration with the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg (Prof. Edda Tobiasch), the conference took place from September 13-15, 2011, at the university campus in Rheinbach in a rural and modern atmosphere.

The GBS2011 had 5 sessions, including DNA damage and repair, the cellular radiation response, clinical radiation biology, characteristics of high-LET radiation (HAMLET) and environmental aspects of ionizing and non-ionizing radiation. Almost all the talks were done in German except during the HAMLET session.

“It was a great possibility for me to enter the frontier of the radiation field covered by scientists from the all over Germany, to broaden my scientific view, and of course to learn German (now it seems really important for me also in scientific field),” Yueyuan Hu states.

Hands-on-science in the Roentgen Museum in Remscheid-Lennep
Kristina Koch gave a presentation in the “Cellular Radiation Response Session”. Petra Schwendner had the very last talk in the environmental session and fascinated the audience with the impressive survivability of different microorganisms. Arif Ali Chishti and Yueyuan Hu presented a poster. There were long poster sessions during the coffee breaks. “We could stretch our limbs, grab some snacks and drinks hang around at the posters, discussing the up to date hypotheses and results. It was exciting for me to present my poster to the people interested in the topic and to get feedback and suggestions,” Yueyuan Hu describes her experience of the poster session. But that was not all. At the conference dinner in a fancy location in Remscheid-Lennep, after a visit to the Roentgen Museum, she was awarded the poster price for the poster session “characteristics of high-LET radiation and environmental aspects”. Her poster showed the effects of heavy ion exposure on the differentiation and mineralization process of the murine preosteoblastic cell line OCT-1 in comparison to the effects of sparsely ionizing radiation. The GBS president Prof. George Iliakis (University of Essen) gave her the award certificate. The price was the book entitled “The Grand Design”, by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow – Yueyuan Hu liked this sentence most: if the god created the world, then who created god?

Kristina Koch during her presentation “Evaluating the Functionality of Chemical Inhibitors to Suppress the NF-kB Pathway”

SpaceLife was not only present with four doctoral candidates at the GBS2011, but also with a cube that experienced weightlessness during a parabolic flight (16^th DLR Parabolic Flight Campaign – MICOS-2 Badracs-Ullrich-Thiel)

Petra Schwendner explains the “Exposure of (Hyper-) Thermophilic Microorganisms to UV and Ionizing Radiation“