EBSA’s 18th annual moot

DUHS scientists’ poster judged as the best

By Our Staff Reporter

KARACHI- Young scientists of Dow University of Health Sciences’ (DUHS) department of molecular pathology attended the “18th annual meeting of the European Bio-safety Association (EBSA) “Orchestrating a (bio) safe world” held in Vienna, Austria.

According to a press release issued here, the annual conference of the EBSA is one of the major global bio-safety and bio-security events of the year. Pre-conference courses covered a wide-range of topics, all aligned with the bio-safety professional competence training specifications. Posters of Dr Saeed Khan, Head of Molecular Pathology, DUHS and Noor-ul-aine Masood, Medical Technologist & Biosafty Officer at DUHS were accepted for presentation and received travel grant to participate in annual conference.

The conference revolved around an interactive session that enabled participants to embrace innovative bio-safety practices and tools. A number of experts, specialists, researchers and educators chaired and spoke in pre-conference courses, plenary sessions and parallel sessions, where they discussed and presented the latest information and findings for quality research to enhance learning, knowledge and awareness regarding bio-safety and bio-security.

The two-day conference started with an opening ceremony and was followed by keynote lectures delivered by renowned scientists who highlighted the importance of bio-safety and safety procedures and their strict regulations in the laboratory.

Different sessions relating to bio risk, bio-safety issues, communicating risks, synthetic biology and role of E-learning in providing safety training were organized and were followed by the poster presentation session.

Poster presented by DUHS’s Noor-ul-aine Maqsood and Dr Saeed Khan (co-authors: Fatin Zehra, Maria Zahid, Sehrish Bint-e-Mohsin) entitled “Inter-departmental survey to check the impact of bio-safety training sessions among lab employees” was selected as the best posters.

The conference ended up with a closing ceremony and remarks from the EBSA president and prize distribution for the best poster, which was received by Dr Saeed and Ms Noor-ul-aine.

It was a moment of pride for the country to succeed among a very competitive pool of researchers and presenters, the release added.