19 – 23.08.2024: 15th anniversary of the Leipzig-Vanderbilt-Connection / 10th anniversary of funding by the Max Kade Foundation
The existing Leipzig-Vanderbilt Exchange Program, a 10-year program sponsored by the Max Kade Foundation and Vanderbilt and Leipzig Universities, provides selected students, postdocs and project leaders an opportunity for an 3 month academic experience in the United States or Germany, celebrated its 15th anniversary during the week of August 19 in Nashville.
Together with more than 20 project leaders and the academic representatives this international symposium will specifically aim to provide a platform for networking and scientific exchange: by Lab-visits, individual groupmeetings, talks and discussions we will deepen the longstanding scientific collaborations and this will strenghend the bilateral partnership with joint research projects.
This partnerschip existence since 2009 and based on a joint „Memorandum of Understanding“ (MOU) in which the allows and encourages of academic exchanges between both universities; facilitate joint research programs, student programs, and a cultural ex-change program are signed. The aim of this cooperation is to increase the international visibility of both universities and to extent collaboration between them and beyond. There are striking similarities in the development of research and education including a strong focus in biomedicine, structural biochemistry, and chemical biology. The collaboration currently developed into a bilateral partnership with joint research projects.
There are striking similarities in the development of research and education at both universities, including a strong focus in chemical biology. Specific interests include the fundamentals of membrane protein structure and their interactions with small molecules, a key research area for the development of therapeutics. The current collaboration combines cutting-edge specializations in disciplines and technologies to design research projects of high complexity and impact that neither of the two research groups could complete on their own. At the same time, a fertile arena for trainees has been created by the orthogonal approaches to scientific discovery, the interdisciplinary nature of the research, complementary technologies, and cultural experiences.
Vanderbilt’s association with LU started with Jens Meiler, associate professor of chemistry and pharmacology, who graduated from Leipzig with a master’s degree in chemistry in 1998. Meiler’s research on computational structural and chemical biology came to the attention of Annette Beck-Sickinger, a well-established LU scientist in the field of G-Protein Coupled Receptors (GPCRs) with peptide ligands. The fledgling collaboration officially took off in 2009 when Beck-Sickinger took a three-month sabbatical, co-sponsored by the Vanderbilt International Office (VIO) and the Department of Chemistry, at the Vanderbilt Institute for Chemical Biology (VICB) to study neuropeptide Y (NPY) GPCRs. During her visit she helped establish a number of collaborations, leading the administrations of the two universities to sign a five-year memorandum of understanding that allows and encourages academic exchanges, facilitates joint research programs, student programs and a cultural exchange program.
Today LU and VU share common research interests in structural and chemical biology, chemistry, pharmacology, biomedicine and bioinformatic. Both institutions have invested in complementary technologies and built complementary expertise. Over the past 15 years, more than 180 visits on all scientific levels (faculty to students) which end up in more than 70 corporative scientific papers published and 50 teaching modules, and have create longlasting collaborative projects that demonstrate the fertile ground of this joint program in research and education.