| Banging A Drum For Oulu Science |
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| By Mirja Krause | ||||||
| Tuesday, 12 June 2007 | ||||||
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Oulu may be the Silicon Valley of Finland, but the city has a lot more to offer than IT. Biology and biomedicine, for instance, are equally hip. Biocenter, an umbrella organisation hosted by the university, fuses different working groups and departments – fifteen groups in total with a steadily growing staff of 270 personnel, half located at the Linnanmaa campus, half at the Medical Campus. But just what makes Biocenter so special? What does it offer those who are part of it, and Oulu as a city? To find out, Mirja Krause interviews Sinikka Eskelinen, Biocenter Oulu coordinator and on the governing board of the graduate school. A Nicely Furnished Office “Which means I’m basically doing everything,” she jokes. “Mainly I help our scientific director with applications, reports and negotiations with the rector or the Ministry of Education.” At the moment she’s editing Biocenter’s annual report, fresh from print in a couple of weeks. “I’m a cell biologist and worked in a biocenter group in pathology, but I’m not a physician. I’m a master of science, so it was hard to carry on a career in pathology.” When the coordinator position opened, Eskelinen applied. Now she finds herself managing not only Biocenter Oulu, but increasingly, Biocenter Finland as well. “Biocenter Finland’s the new organisation,” she explains, “so I’m editing the webpages and brochures for it too.” For a very busy woman, Eskelinen seems remarkably calm. What’s Biocenter for, anyway? “Research. It’s a research network and more and more a research institute, partly because we now own our own facilities. Earlier it was only between groups of different departments of Oulu University, but we now have this research building at Medipolis with most of the core facilities.” Biocenter Oulu, she explains, focuses broadly on biomedicine and bioscience, not, like other huge research centers in Europe, neuroscience or cancer biology. Benefits for Students Of the students that attend the Biocenter graduate school, fifty percent are foreigners. “Everything is in English. The official language of Biocenter Oulu is English. That means all the seminars and lectures as well as the correspondence.” While PhD students are certainly profiting, I wonder how Oulu and the university of Oulu benefits from an organisation like Biocenter. According to Eskilinen, the institute itself doesn’t work closely with any particular companies, although “some of the individual groups do, especially the faculty of technology, and for them it’s natural to collaborate with companies.” Nonetheless, she presses, the center is very important for the university and city. “We’ve almost 150 PhD students and our graduate school produces more than ten percent of the theses finished each year. Our budget is for about five percent, but we’re so efficient in PhD training that it’s more than ten percent.” “Also in Oulu we’re very broad and organised: we’ve many groups in the science faculty but then also very clinical groups. So we’re very multidisciplinary, and that makes Oulu more attractive for scientists. Of course there’s more money and therefore more jobs. We’ve recruited many foreign group leaders and they’ve remained here – like Rik Wierenga, Peter Neubauer, and Andre Juffer. I mean, not just come and left again, but built their groups and their homes here.” Setting up the Center “Later,” she continues, “when the center had grown bigger and the core facilities had been built up and opened to everyone, researchers and teachers at the departments understood that this was and still is a way to attract more money to Oulu as well as to finance expensive facilities.” Biocenter has transgenics, electron microscopes, and x-ray cristallography equipment – facilities that no single department can afford alone. Setbacks? “Of course,” she smiles. “The Biocenter was established by three professors, Trygvarson, Kivirikko, and Vihko. Unfortunately all of them left simultaneously. Trygvarson was called to the Karolinska Institute, Kivirikko was chosen to become President of the Academy of Finland and Vihko was reaching retirement. Doubts arose. What’ll happen? Will the Biocenter just fade away?” The opposite occurred, according to Eskelinen. “Our new director Taina Pihlajaniemi is a very good administrator and scientist, and she and some other important scientists filled up the gap. It wasn’t easy, we had to work for it of course.” Now Biocenter has overcome its early obstacles in its way, it’s been growing steadily. There are six Biocenters in Finland, in Turku, in Helsinki, in Kuopio, Tampere, and Oulu – “together, they form the network that’s officially Biocenter Finland.” Bio-Networking And what about other biocenters in Europe? Do they exist? “Yes: in Vienna, for example, but mostly the centers are more specific, like the cancer center in London or the German neuroscience centers. Finland’s population’s too small to have an enormous cancer center. If one was set up we couldn’t have anything else, so we have to be more flexible. Oulu has a broad variety of sciences.” “Nevertheless in certain areas we are especially strong, like matrix biology or cardiovascular tissues systems. We collaborate with the big centers in the world.” Biocenter Oulu, Eskelinen emphasises, has been very active in creating science policies. “It’s the oldest Biocenter, and has been a driving force within the set up of the Biocenter Finland. Our director Taina Pihlajaniemi is the first chair and I’m the first coordinator of Biocenter Finland. Also as a center the Biocenter Oulu works the best. Our core facilities are very well running and very well organised and realised, and our graduation school is the largest of all the Biocenter graduate schools.” “That’s what makes Oulu so unique,” she concludes with a smile. A Student Perspective “Biocenter organizes excellent courses with high-quality speakers from all over the world. The topics of these courses are new and fresh, and often are even new topics for me. The knowledge generated in the Biocenter Oulu groups is disseminated to other groups as well. I personally have already gained new insights from that fact.” Casteleijn is an active member of the graduate school board, and claims that he is profiting a lot from his membership. “Not only do I learn about other fields, but, more importantly, the various core facilities of the biocenter help my daily research and to reduce costs.” Just recently he attended a lecture in Helsinki using a Biocenter travel grant. When I ask him if he thinks Biocenter is a model other European universities could adopt, he states that in Germany, the UK and Ireland, that is already about to happen. “But it’d be a good thing for universities to organize themselves into a Biocenter. Many foreign visitors say they envy our setup here in Biocenter Oulu, and wish they had similar core-facilities or graduate school system to what we have here in Oulu.”
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