Course Molecular Immunology

The course B226/12 Molecular Immunology is being offered by the Graduate School of Health, Aarhus University, spring 2025.

Criteria for participation: University degree in medicine, dentistry, nursing, or Master’s degree in other fields and/or postgraduate research fellows (PhD students and research-year medical students).

Requirements for participation: The course requires some previous experience with immunology and immunology research, typically at the level of an undergraduate course in molecular medicine or medicine. For a background to the course or if you want a broad treatise of immunology, we refer you to excellent standard text books in the field such as Janeway’s Immunology (Norton & Company, 10th Edition).

Aim:  The course aims to provide you with an idea about current methodologies, topics, and, not at least, principle investigators with research interests that could potentially help you on with your own project.

Learning outcomes: As there is no examination, the intention is really that the student picks topics of interest from the presented talks in the hope that some of these topics may be helpful in bringing the student further into understanding immunology as a possible. Past experiences suggest that a broad range of backgrounds permit the student to follow the course at a fully acceptable level.

Workload: The full workload of the course is expected to be 42 hours

Content: The objective of this course is to provide you with an introduction to select topics in current immunology. This means that researchers from Aarhus University will update you on some of their preferred research interest and the content is entirely driven by the presenters. Presented topics typically include primary immunodeficiencies, the biology of receptors in the immune system, rheumatology, T cell biology, B cell immunology and autoimmunity, cancer immunology, neuroimmunology and  biophysical immunology. With this case-based presentation, we hope to raise your interest through the relevance these cases and their methodologies may have to your own research. If you are searching for a more systematic presentation of the immune system, we refer you to, for instance, the American Association of Immunologists Summer School or similar.

As you will note from the program, a session for discussion of a paper is planned for the first three day. These papers are uploaded under contents (Papers A, B or C). You will have time for preparation before lunch, but reading the papers before the session is strongly recommended. For Paper A, we will perform an ordinary journal-club like session, where we will walk through the paper. For papers B and C, we will organize the discussion differently: the course participants will be divided into two teams, defending or attacking the paper’s scientific claims. Afterwards, a vote is made on the quality of the paper.  

The course will also include two talks by employees in companies with research interests in inflammation and immunology. This is a chance to follow how basic research findings are implemented in commercial products and strategies.

Instructors: Faculty from the Inflammation Network in Aarhus University as well as invited guest speakers from academia and industry.

Venue: Aarhus University, Aarhus

Participation in the course is without cost for:

• PhD students, Health Research Year students from Aarhus University
• PhD students enrolled at partner universities of the Nordoc collaboration
• PhD students from other institutions in the open market agreement for PhD courses

Course dates:

• 08 April 2025 09:00 - 15:45
• 09 April 2025 09:00 - 15:45
• 10 April 2025 09:00 - 15:45
• 11 April 2025 09:00 - 15:45