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ÖGAI News

REPORT ÖGAI VIRTUAL ANNIVERSARY 2020

Dear ÖGAI members,

On Dec. 4. 20 the 1st Virtual ÖGAI Day took place. There were 100 virtual participants on the day. It started with a thematic block on SARS-CoV2. Sylvia Knapp shed light on the immunological changes in the context of a COVID infection. The lecture of Andreas Bergthaler dealt with the spread of the SARS-CoV2 virus and the respective mutations. These data were generated in his laboratory and nicely showed the spread of the virus from the hot spot Ischgl based on the mutation analysis of the SARS-CoV2 virus. In the last lecture Ursula Wiedermann-Schmidt discussed the currently available vaccinations.

This was followed by the General Assembly with reports from the President, Secretary and Treasurer. In addition, the election of the new ÖGAI board took place, which will take over its work on 1.1.2021.

Finally, the ÖGAI prizes were awarded.

The Clemens von Pirquet Prize went to Ursula Smole for her paper “Serum amyloid A is a soluble pattern recognition receptor that drives type 2 immunity” published in Nature Immunology 2020.

The Karl Landsteiner Prize went to Thomas Krausgruber for his paper “Structural cells are key regulators of organ-specific immune responses” published in Nature 2020.

The Ursula and Fritz Melchers Dissertation Prize was awarded to Dominika Polak.

The ÖGAI dissertation awards went to Julia Brunner, Izabela Borek and Jörg Klufa.

The virtual day of the ÖGAI showed that virtual meetings are possible and also find corresponding approval. Unfortunately, the abstracts of the young researchers had to be omitted this year, as this was not possible due to the short organisational time and also the costs. We are very happy that the day went off without any major technical complications and hope that the participants were also satisfied.

Katharina Artinger and Kathrin Eller (organisation team)