Sixteen students from eight countries attended a February seminar for Fischer scholarship recipients. The scholarship is awarded by the Faculty of Science to foreign students of doctoral study programmes. At the seminar, students presented their projects focused on e.g. the analysis of sustainable consumption and production patterns in developing countries, electrochemical detection systems and their use in chromatography, and reactive oxygen species in retrograde signaling in higher plants.
“After last year’s forced break due to the anti-epidemic measures, this year we were able to organise a traditional seminar in which foreign doctoral students, who are awarded the Fischer scholarship, report on the results of their research. In addition to the scholarship holders and their supervisors, several Vice-Deans of the Faculty of Science, and Vice-Rector for International Relations Jiří Stavovčík also took part in the seminar. There was a consensus among the academics present that the formal and factual level of contributions was generally very good and has improved since the last seminar in 2020,” said Miloslav Dušek, Vice-Dean for International Affairs.
The range of works presented was very wide. For example, Soodabeh Hassanpour from the Department of Analytical Chemistry is working on a new type of fast sensor for the determination of hydrogen peroxide in biological samples. This fluid plays a crucial role in the inflammatory reactions of cells. “The development of a sufficiently sensitive, fast and miniature sensor can tell us a lot, for example, about the effect of nanoparticulate drugs on these basic physiological pathways in cells. In my work, I focused on the use of molecular fingerprinting techniques to capture the peroxidase enzyme as part of an electrochemical sensor. So far, the sensor enables the determination of hydrogen peroxide in complex blood samples, which we consider to be a great success, because this is the initial stage for the study of inflammatory activity in cells.”
The seminar for Fischer scholarship holders was held under the auspices of Dean Martin Kubala at the Faculty of Science for the fifth time. Young researchers from France, Iran, Iraq, Spain, India, Cameroon, Morocco, and China were given the opportunity to present their work to the academic community and were able to get feedback. “The atmosphere was pleasant and friendly. The discussions, attended by doctoral students and guests, were very lively. Notwithstanding the fact that the thematic scope of the seminar was so broad,” added Dušek.
