Students of the Ural State Medical University completed an internship at Sirius University in fundamental and translational areas of neuroscience. For five days, future doctors were trained by leading experts in the field of neurobiology, neurosurgery, genetics and the development of new drugs, practicing in Russian and foreign research centers.

The internship at Sirius became possible due to the fact that in February 2022 USMU won a grant from the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation for the development of student scientific communities. At the expense of the grant, 17 students received a unique opportunity to study at the University of Science and Technology.

“There are 12 youth scientific laboratories at Ural State Medical University, three of them have a positive expert evaluation from the Russian Academy of Sciences and will receive financial support under the Priority 2030 program for the development of research projects. An internship at Sirius is not only a great chance to meet world-class scientists, but also an opportunity to see how scientific work is organized in leading laboratories,” said USMU Vice-Rector for Research and Clinical Work, Professor Marina Ufimtseva.

The internship program has been developed taking into account the latest achievements of science, and all teachers have international accreditation and work experience abroad. During the training, in addition to fundamental lectures, lecturers and clinicians talked about their real experience in laboratories and the results they had achieved. In the Molecular Immunology Lab, students were even able to conduct their own experiments, during which they observed how different drugs can change the behavior of the most popular fish in neuroscience – zebrafish.

During the internship, USMU students discovered a number of promising areas of research activities, including work with neural interfaces and prosthetics of the spinal cord functions in laboratory animals.

Elena Ugryumova, a 3rd year student of the Faculty of Pediatrics, was among those studying under the Sirius University program. From school, she actively participated in the project shifts of Ural State Medical University. While still a schoolgirl, Elena went to Sirius with a neural network project that detects pathologies on x-rays of the lungs.

Sirius is a unique interdisciplinary platform. We were taught by 15 specialists from Russian and foreign universities, including biologists and medical practitioners of world renown. For me, the lectures on pathologies of the spinal cord were the most interesting: I did a summer internship at a children’s hospice and here, during the internship, I was able to ask questions that worried me. After Sirius, each of us had a burning desire to create our own project in the field of neuroscience,” said Ugryumova.

One of the most memorable events was a visit to the Research Institute of Medical Primatology. This is a unique facility for our country, where thousands of primates of various species are kept and bred. Several laboratories operate on the basis of the research institute. Among them are the laboratory of virology, where spontaneous viral infections of monkeys and humans are studied, and the laboratory of endocrinology, where the aging process is studied.