Travel story: Rudrarup Bhattacharjee

Rudrarup Bhattacharjee from the Robinson Research Institute travelled to Melbourne to attend and present at the International Congress of Genetics in July.

What was a highlight of the travel?
Meeting esteemed human geneticist from across the world, learning about emerging significance of genomics in healthcare and witnessing the presentation of Gruber Genetics Prize 2023 presented to Prof. Lynne Maquat and Prof Allan Jacobson.

How will the experience support you and your research going forward?
Getting to know so many recent and unpublished studies gave me a great picture of how global genetics and genomics field is moving. Based on the experience, we can design better and more focused research questions which the field is demanding currently and enhance our contribution to the field, particularly to help patients. Also, I will share the global perspective I gained in meeting with my group on what are the burning topics around using genetic to model and inform childhood neurological disease which may help strategize our future grant applications towards more favourable considerations.

What was the most exciting thing you learned/experienced as part of your travel?
One on one conversations with giants of the genetics field like Evan Eichler, Lynne Maquat, Hugo Bellen among others. It was so enriching to exchange ideas with these esteemed scientists and get feedback on my own work, which was well received.

What was the most interesting or unexpected moment of your travel?
Most interesting part was to see how different animal model organisms have become more essential part of genetic and genomic research. It’s more of discovering the functional impact of a gene in an organism context and use that knowledge to discover therapeutic windows for helping human patients, rather than just discovering a gene and giving a genotype-phenotype relation.