by Vasundra Touré, NTNU

I had the chance to do my international exchange in Paris for 6months where I visited two research groups: Pr. Emmanuel Barillot’s group at Institut Curie and Pr. Denis Thieffry’s group at ENS Paris. Both have common domains of interest with my group. With the approval of my supervisor, I did this research stay in the first year of my PhD to help me comfort the structure of my research project. Plus, while still be at the beginning of my PhD, I was flexible to add new insights or new areas to explore in my project.

For me, it has been a good experience. You get to see how the different groups work and you benefit from the richness of skills of each group. I learned a lot about certain topics that I didn’t know anything about (e.g, computation of trap spaces to find stable states for boolean models) and also got feedbacks regarding my own project from an external point of view (e.g, representation of causality statements and ways to extract them from existing repositories). I also had the opportunity to help people in the groups with certain topics that I was familiar with. So, I was happy to return the favor! I attended the groups meetings where I got to know about projects of the teams and, lab seminars that involved more people from the department with topics that were sometimes completely different to what I am doing, but still interesting to listen to.

During this research stay, I have been able to attend several meetings and workshops relevant for my project (e.g, GREEKC, Curation Workshop on Molecular and Causal Interaction, COMBINE) which helped me to put on track one part of my PhD project and for which I am currently writing a paper.

 

 

Besides work, I enjoyed my time in Paris. Most of my family and friends are there, so it was refreshing to spend some time with them. And Paris is a beautiful city.

 

 

Thank you NORBIS for funding this research stay. I would also like to thank both groups that hosted me. This has been resourceful for my PhD, which is definitely on tracks now! A couple of ideas emerged from this research stay, some work done, some work still in progress. One month after my stay, I am still working on some of the tasks started during my stay abroad and this gave to my group new perspectives to study as well!