Five people sit on a blue sofa and one stands speaking next to a large screen.

Image: Gabrielle Beans

May 22: 15th anniversary celebration conference

We have invited distinguished alumni and international researchers to join us in a conference retrospective covering the wide array of research questions and approaches that have emerged from our experiment in collaborative, interdisciplinary science.

There will be fun activities inspired by our IceLab Camp experience designed to get everyone interacting between the talks.

We will wrap the day up with a special anniversary dinner.

Conference Schedule

Venue: Rotundan

8:30 - Registration & welcome reception
Check-in and receive event materials

9:00 - Opening ceremony
Martin Rosvall, IceLab Director, opens up the days' events.

Marianne Sommarin, Professor emeritus, and former Umeå University Vice-Chancellor for Research when IceLab first opened, will say a few words.

9:15 - Alumni from early IceLab days
Keynote presentations from IceLab alumni

Chair: Sebastian Diehl

Jevin West, Professor, University of Washington, USA - The benefits and dangers of anthropomorphic conversational agents
Fariba Karimi, Professor, Graz University of Technology, Austria - Complex system approach for addressing structural inequalities
Ala Trusina, Associate Professor, Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen - Cell polarity ㅡ a driver of morphological diversity and robustness?

10:45 - Coffee break

11:15 - IceLab's multidisciplinary postdoctoral programme funded by Kempestiftelserna

Presentations from researchers connected to the program, with a special introduction from Alice Kempe, Chairperson of Kempestiftelserna.

Chair: Ludvig Lizana, Associate professor, Department of Physics and IceLab

Jonatan Klaminder, Professor in Soil Science, SLU, Umeå - How Icelab helped us solve an enigma
Laura Carroll, Assistant Professor, Department of Clinical Microbiology, Umeå - Resolving microbial genomes in complex communities at the single-cell level
Josephine Solowiej-Wedderburn, Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics, Umeå - Navigating the buffet table: how the environment shapes bacterial interactions

12:00 to 13:30 - Lunch

Venue: Hjortron restaurant

During the lunch we will play a game from IceLab Camp.

13:30 - IceLab now and future: Stress Response Modeling at IceLab

Presentations from new faculty connected to Stress Response Modeling at IceLab, with a special introduction from Göran Sandberg, member of the board of directors of the Knut and Alice Wallenberg foundation.

Chair: Martin Rosvall

Gerard Rocher-Ros, Assistant professor at Department of Ecology and Environmental Science, Stress Response Modeling at IceLab, Umeå University - Modelling Ecosystem ecology and biogeochemistry in northern ecosystems
Kemal Avican, Research fellow at Department of Molecular Biology, Stress Response Modeling at IceLab, Umeå University - Revealing and resolving transcriptional programs of bacteria during infection
Lightning talks from IceLab and Stress Response Modeling PhD students:
- Florian Albrecht, Department of Molecular Biology
- Defne Plätturk, Department of Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics
- Antón Carcedo Martinez, Department of Physics
- Sena Gizem Süer, Department of Molecular Biology
- Oleksandr Cherednichenko, Department of Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics
- Hugo Harlin, Department of Ecology, Environment and Geoscience

14:30 - Novel idea creation and coffee break
Play the IceLab Camp keyword game and stretch the boundaries of your research idea generation skills!

15:30 - Closing remarks from Martin Rosvall