School of Biophotonics is regularly organized at two-year intervals by the Department of Biophysics of Institute of Physics PF UPJŠ in cooperation with Center for Interdisciplinary Biosciences TIP UPJŠ. The school is intended primarily for PhD students in natural sciences, with the primary aim of improving the theoretical and practical knowledge of students in the field of advanced methods of biophotonics.
This year, from 26 to 31 May, ten students participated in the school – three came from institutions in Bratislava (Comenius University Bratislava, Slovak University of Technology, Slovak Academy of Sciences), the others from several departments of the Faculty of Science of P. J. Šafárik University in Košice. During twelve lectures presented by local and foreign experts from Slovakia (Košice, Bratislava, Trnava), Austria and Spain, the PhD students were able to get acquainted with the theoretical foundations of the use of light in the study of living nature, as well as to get an overview of the current modern methods used in biophotonics research of biological systems, such as multimodal imaging, or several high-resolution microscopy techniques.
The school also offered, in collaboration with Zeiss, the opportunity to try out some of these state-of-the-art optical microscopy techniques for imaging living matter. The school programme was complemented by practical exercises, carried out directly by the students in a project form, which also allowed the PhD students to get closer to working in the laboratory to solve specific scientific problems. They then presented the results of their research to the other participants at the end of the school.
Photo: Department of Biophysics
