For the fourth time now the event drew people from many different countries – mainly Europe, but also, for instance, Canada or South Africa – all the way up to Oulu. 

Professor Neubauer, the main initiator of the conference, commented “our research groups wanted, at least once a year, a larger brainstorm meeting to discuss our results with leading scientists.”  Travelling from Oulu to potential partners, explains Neubauer, is time and cost intensive. “A summer school once a year in Oulu will attract scientists from outside the region who are potential collaboration partners and excellent teachers.”  

In previous years, OSSIBE had been structured like a normal scientific conference, with lectures and presentations on a subject and not much time to discuss everyday problems the scientists were facing in their home laboratories.  

This year the conference consisted of different small workshops. Each participant presented his/her problem in a small five minute contribution, and a discussion followed; also on the topic from a wider point of view. Participants agreed that, though shy for the first few days, they were able to benefit from the new approach and learnt a lot from the discussions. 

Feedback was very positive throughout. Michael Crampton from CSIR, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research in Pretoria South Africa, stated without hesitation: “It was really great! I liked the idea of having open sessions. Those five minute contributions on certain problems with the discussions afterwards were very useful. I learnt a lot, and got tips after my contribution and also a lot of detailed information on topics not so closely related to my field of research.”

”Of course,” he said, when asked would he come again. “I came mainly to make contacts: in South Africa we’re quite far away from other research groups, and from those short contributions you could easily spot people with similar problems –  that made it easy to find them again afterwards, discuss things further, and even get to know them.”  

Over eighty people attended OSSIBE this year, double the number expected during the first phase of planning the event. Attendees included PhD students and people from foreign companies such as Aligator Bioscience, Sweden, or Invitrogen, UK.  

“It seems already to have become a tradition,” remarked Pekka Kilpeläinen, coordinator of the Biocenter Graduate School.  “It fits nicely with our multidisciplinary PhD curriculum, and gives students and scientists from other fields to mix with bioprocess and company people and sniff out their views and way of thinking.” 

On a Friday afternoon, the posters taken down again and people filing out of the lecture hall for the last time, faces look tired but satisfied. And, certainly, Oulu is not as remote as it might haved seemed on a map – in scientific terms.

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