How can we make sure the practices of disseminating research findings evolve with the times?

The primary means of dissemination is publication. And while the contents of scientific publications have changed a lot over the last 100 years, the methods and structure of publication have seen relatively few changes, and most of them only in the last 10 years.

Rethinking these methods was the theme of last year's DDEA Postdoc Summit Challenge.

The pressure to publish is especially intense for early-career researchers, so they themselves were invited to rethink the approaches to scientific publishing in the Challenge. 

The Summit participants' solutions include standardised procedures for accessibility and reproducibility, a database for peer reviewers, multifaceted metrics for determining academic credit, a reproducibility framework, and responsible use of AI.

But what might a professional in scientific publishing say to these proposed solutions?

In this episode, we once again hand the microphone to postdoc Christopher Lewis, as he interviews the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Diabetologia, Hindrik Mulder.

Listen, as different solutions for challenging scientific dissemination put forth by early-career researchers are taken up for debate with an expert in scientific publishing.

Episode info

Guest

• Hindrik Mulder, Editor-in-Chief of Diabetologia and Professor at Lund University

Host

•  Christopher Lewis, Postdoc, University of Copenhagen

Produced by

Gretchen Repasky, Education & Networking Manager, Danish Diabetes and Endocrine Academy

Published by 

Danish Diabetes and Endocrine Academy

Editor

Nikolai Rosler – Rosler Productions


You can find additional information about our podcasts on Podcasts | Danish Diabetes and Endocrine Academy (ddeacademy.dk)

Did you know that half a million children die every year of a completely treatable disease? Can you imagine what it would be like to be pregnant or have children in a low-income country where this disease is prevalent?

This is the reality for many people all over the world. And while it is indeed preventable, malaria kills millions each year because of sparse access to health care.

Danish postdoc Line Hjort saw the extent of this when she went to a rural village in Tanzania. There, she joined a local research team studying the impact of malaria on children and pregnant women, such as malaria during pregnancy possibly leading to diabetes later in the child’s life.

Through Line’s story, we are given a tour of the Tanzanian healthcare system, where beds are scarce and access to water even scarcer. More than a third of the pregnant women in the area had malaria during pregnancy. Line and her colleagues saw an extremely high participation rate in their study, despite it being cumbersome to participate. But for parents, this was not just a study – this was a chance for healthcare. And for Line, there were a lot of important cultural perspectives to bring home to Denmark.

Join us for the second episode of Postdocs Talking recorded live at a DDEA event at Folkemødet (The Danish People’s Meeting) 2023.

About Folkemødet
Folkemødet (The People’s Meeting) is a democracy festival in June on the Danish island of Bornholm. Citizens, politicians, NGOs, businesses, and many more meet up for open debates, dialogues, and talks on society and democracy. The festival is inspired by the Swedish counterpart, Almedalsveckan.

DDEA at Folkemødet 2023
DDEA organised a storytelling event, inviting two researchers to tell their science stories. The first speaker was an American who came to Denmark to do research for the Danish society. The second speaker was a Dane who went outside of Denmark to do research for an African society. The name of this event was “Worlds Apart – Two Stories of Health Science for Society”. This is the second of these talks.

Episode info

Speaker

• Line Hjort, BRIDGE postdoctoral fellow at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research at the University of Copenhagen

Host

• Gretchen Repasky, Education & Networking Manager, Danish Diabetes and Endocrine Academy

Produced by

Gretchen Repasky, Education & Networking Manager, Danish Diabetes and Endocrine Academy

Published by 

Danish Diabetes and Endocrine Academy

Editor:

Nikolai Rosler – Rosler Productions 

Thanks:

Public Speaking Coach Adam Montandon from Speakers Impact Network

Katharina Herzog, Novo Nordisk A/S

Morten Dall, University of Copenhagen

Christopher Lewis, University of Copenhagen

You can find additional information about our podcasts on Podcasts | Danish Diabetes and Endocrine Academy (ddeacademy.dk)

How many child development issues go unnoticed in the flurry of short doctor's appointments and limited home visits? How do you properly detect and identify mental health issues in adolescents living with chronic disease?

Maybe it’s time to prioritise and optimise a sometimes overlooked screening tool in clinical practice: Questionnaires.

MD and PhD Kevin Mark’s talk “Missing Maria, Identifying Anna” revolves around implementing and improving identification systems for developmental and mental health in childhood and adolescence.

In Kevin’s talk, we are first introduced to Maria – a child whose special needs were discovered much later than what was ideal. Then, we are introduced to Anna, an adolescent who got lucky when a clever doctor recommended a specific questionnaire that helped identify her disordered eating involving her type 1 diabetes.

Join us for the first episode of Postdocs Talking recorded live at a DDEA event at Folkemødet (The Danish People’s Meeting) 2023.

About Folkemødet
Folkemødet (The People’s Meeting) is a democracy festival in June on the Danish island of Bornholm. Citizens, politicians, NGOs, businesses, and many more meet up for open debates, dialogues, and talks on society and democracy. The festival is inspired by the Swedish counterpart, Almedalsveckan.

DDEA at Folkemødet 2023
DDEA organised a storytelling event, inviting two researchers to tell their science stories. The first speaker was an American who came to Denmark to do research for the Danish society. The second speaker was a Dane who went outside of Denmark to do research for an African society. The name of this event was “Worlds Apart – Two Stories of Health Science for Society”. This is the first of these two talks. 

Speaker

•  Kevin Marks, MD, PhD from Aarhus University, KBU doctor at Odense University Hospital

Host

•  Gretchen Repasky, Education & Networking Manager, Danish Diabetes and Endocrine Academy

 
Produced by

Gretchen Repasky, Education & Networking Manager, Danish Diabetes and Endocrine Academy

Published by 

Danish Diabetes and Endocrine Academy

Editor

Nikolai Rosler – Rosler Productions 

Thanks:

Public Speaking Coach Adam Montandon from Speakers Impact Network

Katharina Herzog, Novo Nordisk A/S

Morten Dall, University of Copenhagen

Christopher Lewis, University of Copenhagen


You can find additional information about our podcasts on Podcasts | Danish Diabetes and Endocrine Academy (ddeacademy.dk)

Is the scientific publication, as we know it, dead?

This was the central question behind the theme for this year’s DDEA Postdoc Summit Challenge.

Researchers learn early on to think in terms of impact factors and citation metrics. In an overflowing ocean of scientific content, the pressure to make your publications matter seems higher than ever. Yet according to recent studies, the impact of Danish research has been on an overall steady decline, and papers are generally becoming less disruptive over time.

But what is scientific impact and how is it measured? And is it time to look at alternatives to a practice that has changed very little in the last 100 years?

In this episode, we hand over the microphone to a postdoc, Christopher Lewis, who landed an interview with none other than the Senior Vice President of Impact at the Novo Nordisk Foundation, Thomas Alslev Christensen.

Listen, as an early-career researcher addresses the burning questions about the direction of scientific impact to one with a job specifically tied to this subject at a highly influential research institution.

The Novo Nordisk Foundation:

The Novo Nordisk Foundation (NNF) is a Danish foundation supporting the business and research activities of the Novo Group’s companies (Novo Nordisk A/S and Novozymes A/S), providing support for scientific, humanitarian, and social purposes. In 2022, the NNF granted DKK 7.464 billion DKK for a total of 695 new initiatives. The DDEA is funded by the NNF with a five-year grant of 194 million DKK.

Guests

• Thomas Alslev Christensen, Senior Vice President of Impact at the Novo Nordisk Foundation

Host

• Christopher Lewis, Postdoc, University of Copenhagen

 
Produced by

Gretchen Repasky, Education & Networking Manager, Danish Diabetes and Endocrine Academy

Published by 

Danish Diabetes and Endocrine Academy

 
Editor

Nikolai Rosler – Rosler Productions

 
You can find additional information about our podcasts on Podcasts | Danish Diabetes and Endocrine Academy (ddeacademy.dk)

Did you know that having diabetes can affect sexual function? It can even cause erectile dysfunction (ED). And, for a proportion of people living with diabetes and cardiovascular diseases, drugs like Viagra have little to no effect.

So how do we find new ways of treatment for a growing segment of the population that is missed by current treatment options?

For most men, ED is caused by physical, rather than psychological, problems and is often seen as an early warning sign of cardiovascular diseases. ED is most commonly treated with drugs inhibiting an enzyme called phosphodiesterase 5, PDE5 for short. Viagra, the so-called “miracle drug” is a PDE5 inhibitor, and it is generally effective. But if the ED is caused by another health condition like diabetes or heart disease, the effect can be lessened - and some patients don’t respond at all.

In the hunt for alternatives to the “miracle drug”, scientists have made promising findings in studies with modulation of other pathways, such as calcium channels in endothelial cells or dopamine signalling.

Listen as an expert in urology and a senior scientist studying erectile dysfunction talk about causes, co-morbidities, and new approaches to treatment.

Guests

• Mikkel Fode, Professor of Urology, University of Copenhagen
• Simon Comerma, Postdoctoral Scientist, Aarhus University

Host:
Gretchen Repasky, Education and Network Manager, Danish Diabetes and Endocrine Academy 

Publisher:
Danish Diabetes and Endocrine Academy

You can find additional information about the podcast at www.ddeacademy.dk/podcasts 

AI is dramatically changing the landscape of drug discovery in research today, but what is needed for the best outcomes? How do we overcome the challenges?

Artificial intelligence is not the future anymore; it is happening now – and it is happening on a grand scale.

Academic researchers and pharmaceutical companies have started utilising AI to aid in drug discovery. Drug discovery is a lengthy and costly process, with average research and development for new drugs taking 10-20 years and costing billions of dollars. New approaches are needed, and looking to AI might unlock potential that we have not yet imagined. But are there costs?

Listen as an expert in AI and machine learning and an experimental biologist discuss the evolution, applications of AI and its possible uses in medical research.

Guests:

Per Greisen, Director of Computational Drug Discovery at Novo Nordisk.

Hande Topel, Postdoctoral researcher in a functional genomics and metabolism unit at the University of Southern Denmark

Host:
Gretchen Repasky, Communications Director, Nordic EMBL Partnership for Molecular Medicine and the University of Helsinki.

Publisher:
Danish Diabetes and Endocrine Academy

Producer:
Kontekst & Lyd

You can find additional information about the podcast at www.ddeacademy.dk/podcasts  

Nowadays science is often driven by patterns in big data. What can we learn from the data and how does finding patterns help us understand chronic diseases better? And, where do we start? 

Perhaps we start with human genetics research on a little island in the North Atlantic with about 350,000 inhabitants.

Iceland is a small society with a healthcare system rooted in clinical and health registries. As a result, people have been contributing to biomedical research over the years by sharing their genetic and medical data with researchers around the world. Combining this wealth of data with modern technologies makes for great opportunities for furthering our understanding of the role of our genes in relation to disease development.

In fact, human genetics research has identified thousands of genetic variants associated with disease risk, but we do not yet understand their molecular and cellular mechanisms.

We need to make such data actionable in the biotech and pharma industries if we want to discover biomarkers and create new therapies to help patients with high, unmet needs.

Listen as experts in bioinformatics, drug targets, drug discovery, and biomarkers discuss data and the interdisciplinary field of systems medicine.

Guests: 

Valborg Guðmundsdóttir, research scientist at the University of Iceland, and the Icelandic Heart Association.

Henrik Bjørk Hansen, principal scientist at the biotech company GUBRA.

Host:

Gretchen Repasky, Communications Director, Nordic EMBL Partnership for Molecular Medicine and University of Helsinki.

Publisher: Danish Diabetes Academy

Producer: Kontekst & Lyd

You can find additional information about the podcast at www.danishdiabetesacademy.dk/podcasts  

How far do you live from a healthcare clinic? Around the corner or across the country?

In the Western world we have come to expect easy access to healthcare facilities, but that's not always the case. And, access to health care is essential for people living with diabetes or other chronic diseases, because they need regular treatment and screenings for complications.

For some very remote locations, as is the case some places in Greenland, accessing health care can take days. In addition, Western influence has caught up with Greenland and started what could be the beginning of a diabetes epidemic. Inuit-specific gene variations may affect complications from diabetes, for which screenings can be especially challenging to perform in remote areas.

There are ideas for solutions, and some of them involve smarter screening programs using artificial intelligence. Is this sci-fi or everyday medical practice? How could it work in practice?

Considering these challenges with health care access, we need to do better with research-backed approaches to ensure public health.

Listen as three experts in public health and epidemiology, all with ties to Greenland, discuss the problems and solutions of diabetes care in remote regions.

Guests: 

Stine Byberg, Team Leader and postdoctoral researcher affiliated with the Steno Diabetes Center in Greenland.

Trine Jul Larsen, researcher at the Greenland Center for Health Research at the University of Greenland.

Marit Eika Jørgensen, researcher at the Steno Diabetes Center in Greenland and Professor in Clinical Epidemiology at the University of Southern Denmark.

Host:

Gretchen Repasky, Communications Director, Nordic EMBL Partnership for Molecular Medicine and University of Helsinki.

Publisher: Danish Diabetes Academy

Producer: Kontekst & Lyd

You can find additional information about the podcast at www.danishdiabetesacademy.dk/podcasts  

The open science train has already left the station, but how do we get everyone on board?
Perhaps the road to systemic change is paved with incremental change?

Our society is driven by scientific advances. As such, studies ought to be highly transparent and easily verifiable, yet that is not always the case.
Openness in science is the way forward for improving scientific application and increasing public trust. Pre-registering studies, sharing data and code, and making analyses publicly accessible are just a few of the ways to incorporate more openness in scientific work. In the near future, open science will simply be science done right.
 
Listen as an expert on the role of early life on diabetes risk and an expert in open science offer experiences and recommendations for scientists to incorporate more openness in their research.

Guests: 

• Luke Johnston, Team Leader at the Steno Diabetes Center in Aarhus and Aarhus University in Denmark.
• Ivo Grigorov, Research Coordinator at the National Institute of Aquatic Resources at the Technical University of Denmark in Copenhagen.

Host: Gretchen Repasky, Communications Director, Nordic EMBL Partnership for Molecular Medicine and University of Helsinki.

Publisher: Danish Diabetes Academy
Producer: Kontekst & Lyd

You can find additional information about the podcast at www.danishdiabetesacademy.dk/podcasts

Transcript of the episode available on our website.

Why does one person gain weight differently than another?
What are the molecular events that dictate fat tissue function, and how can we use this information to narrow the gap between lab bench and disease prevention?

Fat is an intelligent organ. Our fat tissue can be influenced by a myriad of different factors, and it can differ vastly from one person to the other, depending on things like genetics. One person with obesity might be predisposed to type 2 diabetes, but another might not.
We need an understanding of how these processes are regulated at the molecular level if we wish to develop better, personalised prevention and treatment strategies.

Listen as experts on the molecular regulation of fat tissue and the pharmaceutical industry discuss improving metabolic health by identifying genes important for fat tissue function.

Guests: 

• Alison Ludzki, Novo Nordisk postdoctoral fellow at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden.
• Mads Tang-Christensen, former Head of Obesity & Liver Disease Research at Novo Nordisk in Denmark.

Host: Gretchen Repasky, Communications Director, Nordic EMBL Partnership for Molecular Medicine and University of Helsinki.

Publisher: Danish Diabetes Academy
Producer: Kontekst & Lyd

You can find additional information about the podcast at www.danishdiabetesacademy.dk/podcasts

Transcript of the episode available on our website.