Summer schools will take place during years 2 and 4 devoted to develop the thematic areas of Bioinformatics analysis and Bioimaging issues in depth, respectively. The Summer schools will be mandatory for all HealthAge ESRs, they will last for ~ 3 days and will require the participation of at least half of the HealthAge PIs plus 3-7 invited speakers. Both summer schools will be open to 10 additional participants. HealthAge ESRs will be actively involved in organizing both schools participating in the advertisement of the events and in selecting external speakers. The following two Summer schools are planned:
1. The Bioinformatics Summer School : The first summer school will be coordinated by FORTH in collaboration with the UKK and the CGÂ group at the University of Crete which is an associate partner of HealthAge-ITN action. The Summer School will take place in a dedicated building at FORTH premises that is equipped with superb computer facilities and servers. The Summer School aims to provide the ESRs with key expertise, training and mentoring in computational approaches related to ageing studies. The first day the course will cover basic aspects of computer programming and data handling. The remaining 2 days, the summer school will focus on the bioinformatics analysis of genomic, metabolomics and proteomic data; there will be opportunity for the ESRs to analyse their own data during this course.
2. The Bioimaging Summer School: The second summer school will be coordinated by the IRB and the UNIOVI in collaboration with the IESL at FORTH, an associate partner of HealthAge-ITN action. The Summer school will take place at the dedicated facilities of IRB. The first day the course will cover basic concepts of microscopy, imaging and image data analysis. The remaining 2 days, the summer school will focus on the design, development and application of tomographic technologies for in-vivo imaging in living systems as well as in the non-invasive visualization of specific molecular targets and pathways by exploiting the fluorescence signal emitted by fluorescent probes attached to cells or molecules; the school will offer practical sessions.