Joint course with University of Toronto given for the 25th time
KI and the Univeristy of Toronto recently celebrated a course collaboration that has been ongoing for more than 25 years.
Last Tuesday, the Canadian embassy hosted a jubilee symposium to celebrate course collaboration for over 25 years between the Univeristy of Toronto (UofT) and Karolinska Institutet (KI).
Attending the symposium was over 50 doctoral students and academics from UofT, KI and special invited doctoral students for four different Hong Kong universities. Among the researchers presenting at the symposium was two participants from the first joint doctoral course, Prof Emeritus Hugo Lagercrantz (KI) who organised the first course, and Prof Stephen Matthews (UofT).
Over 750 doctoral students have participated
Over 750 doctoral students have attended the “Medical Developmental Biology” course and some of them are now part of the KI UofT collaboration and are contributing to the collaboration through their research. The course collaboration between KI and the UofT is unique as the course has been given consistently, with the exception when there was a SARS outbreak in and the COVID pandemic. Ever since the start of the course, the host institute has rotated and every second year KI is the host.
Fredrik Lanner who is one of the current KI course directors says “it is a great honour to continue the tradition of this exchange course while also progressively developing it to keep up with the most exciting and recent research at KI and UofT. Having undertaken my postdoctoral studies in Toronto before returning to KI I am personally very enthusiastic about utilising the exchange course to spark collaborative research between both students and faculty of KI and UofT.”
The vice chair of KI committee for doctoral education, Erika Franzén concludes that “The collaborative joint doctoral course between The University of Toronto and KI is an outstanding example of long term and successful collaboration. These collaborations are very important not only for doctoral education but for the whole university as the long term engagement benefits on many different levels and has continued to grow organically.”