Biomedical Education Part of a Baltic Collaboration
In March Louisa Cheung and Rachel Fisher at the Department of Medicine Solna, travelled to Vilnius University in Lithuania to participate in a “BalticSeaBioMed” network meeting.
BalticSeaBioMed is a consortium of master’s programmes in biomedicine (or similar) at six universities in the Baltic region: the University of Turku, Åbo Akademi University, the University of Eastern Finland, the University of Southern Denmark, Vilnius University, and Karolinska Institutet. The network, which was initiated in 2013 and has had slightly changing members over the years, has been successful in obtaining funding from both Nordplus and the Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership programme.
The network has developed a range of open educational resources in biomedicine and has run six summer schools at the University of Turku Archipelago Research Institute on Seili Island (near Turku, Finland), plus one digital summer school during the pandemic.
In August 2024 the network will once again organise a summer school with the title Human Health and Environment by the Baltic Sea. A total of 30 students will participate, five from each of the participating universities.An educational escape room, that the network is developing, will be piloted at the summer school.
The network’s most recent Norplus application was funded for the period 15th May 2024- 1st October 2025 with Karolinska Institutet as the principal applicant, lead by Rachel Fisher and with Louisa Cheung as the network coordinator. During this period the network will host another summer school (August 2025) as well as continue the development and incorporation of the educational escape room into the master’s programmes in the network.
Rachel Fisher is the Programme Director for the Bachelor’s and Master’s Programmes in Biomedicine and for the Master’s Programme in Molecular Techniques in Life Science. At the Department of Medicine Solna she is the course director for Frontiers in Biomedicine in semester one of the Master’s Programme in Biomedicine. Louisa Cheung is the course director for Frontiers in Translational Medicine in semester one of the Master’s Programme in Molecular Techniques in Life Science.