Careers Day 2024: 3 high school students in the IMSF laboratory

On 25.04.2024 the Institute of Neuroimmunology and Multiple Sclerosis Research (IMSF) participated in the nationwide “Careers Day” for school children in Göttingen. The “Zukunftstag” tries to break with gender stereotypes and brings students closer to professional fields that often are associated with one gender over the other. Further, the aim of the event is to give young people insight into the inner workings of scientific institutions and to give them an understanding of how medical research is performed in the laboratory.

This year the IMSF welcomed three high school students to teach them more about one of our topics in our TRR274 and ERC T-Neuron projects, namely understanding the invasion of pathogenic immune cells into the central nervous system and the subsequent development of autoimmune nerve tissue damage in the course of multiple sclerosis. In this context, the young people were shown in an easy-to-understand approach how immune cells migrate into the brain and spinal cord and can be visualized directly in the tissue. Under the guidance of Dr. Henrike Körner and Martina Weig, the young people were able to independently embed and stain tissue samples and then view them under the fluorescence microscope. In a theoretical part, the students were explained the development of multiple sclerosis and the connection between the microscopic structures and the disease in a generally understandable way.