Breaking down the barriers

Dr. Axel Hochstetter, the researcher at the University of Glasgow, UK, has been a participant of SymBioSE since 2012. He shares the story of an international, interdisciplinary collaboration that started over a casual coffee during SymBioSE-2017 in Portugal:

Hungary was amazing as my first full SymBioSE, it gave me an understanding of the Hungarian culture and research landscape that I would never have obtained otherwise.

But my SymBioSE story started with a very excited discussion during a break in Portugal. A SymBiont from Sweden who is an expert in growing a specific type of brain cells shared my interest in the human blood brain barrier. Over the next two years, we started to set up our interdisciplinary collaboration, managed to acquire funding and are right now publishing our first joint publication on the project in a special issue.

Without SymBioSE, I still would believe that it would never be possible for me to study how pathogens can invade our brains.