Our annual OCDEM Day event celebrating the achievements made by all groups within OCDEM took place on Thursday 22nd January 2015.
Professor Anna Gloyn started off proceedings in style providing us with a fantastic tour de force detailing her work on discovering and understanding the mechanisms behind genes involved in diabetes pathogenesis and how these insights are being translated into improved treatments for patients.
We then had a series of interesting talks looking at Advances in Molecular Endocrinology, Updates on Islet Physiology & Genetics of Diabetes and providing insights into Endocrine & Metabolic Regulators which all generated lots of questions from across the audience. We had one of the best turn outs ever – as demonstrated by the requirement for extra chairs to be put out for several sessions!!!
The day finished with our Annual OCDEM Day Debate entitled: “This house believes that stunt funding, such as the ALS ice bucket challenge, is a good way of raising disease awareness”. Both sides put across strong arguments and many entertaining points (and in some cases a little more of certain SAF members was seen than many of us would have liked– you know who you are). After a series of tricky questions and passionate arguments from both sides, OCDEM voted against the motion.
On behalf of SAF we would like to thank everyone involved including the presenters, debaters, session chairs, everyone who worked behind the scenes and all attendees for creating a really enjoyable event for all.
If you have any suggestion of improvements for future events just let us know and we will be back in 2016!!!