The IBRO-APRC Ulaanbaatar Associate School, a 6 – day school, has been designed for 20 attendees in brain sciences from the countries of the Asian-Pacific region. The local organizers provided lecture rooms, laboratory facilities, and technical aids required for the hands-on procedures during the entire period of the school. In the first 4 days, the students were introduced to theoretical knowledge and technical skills for better understanding of the fundamental principles and methods in cellular, systems, and clinical neuroscience. The students were also provided with hands-on practice in western blotting, tissue processing, staining, microscopy techniques, and handling techniques for rodents. In group discussions, students learned neuroethical issues and were encouraged to give both poster and oral presentations about their current studies. They were also asked to prepare for a Journal club by using computer search for relevant articles to neuroethics. Starting on Day 5, students were facilitated to join the IBRO lectures and plenary lectures at the 7th Annual Meeting of Mongolian Neuroscience Society which was held on August 14-15. Attendees and local organizers enjoyed a gala dinner with cultural performances after the official program.
The attendees were consisted of 17 local awardees from the country and 3 awardees from Chinese Universities. 6 of the attendees were men and 14 of them were women. There were 1 PhD student, 4 Master students, 13 medical doctors, 1 dental doctors, and 1 researcher.
The school was included 2 invited lectures by international faculties from Japan and India and 4 lectures, 9 tech talks, and 4 laboratory hands-on modules by local faculties.
The six-day training workshop was conducted on six consecutive days. Each day the session started at 09:00 am and end at 05:00 pm. Each day there were two fifteen-minute coffee breaks; at 11:00 am and at 04:00 pm. There was a daily one-hour lunch break at 01:00 pm.
At the end of the workshop, participants were asked to fill in an evaluation form, with questions related to their appreciation, on the overall quality of the workshop and of each session, skills and concepts acquired, and recommendations for improving the quality of the training.
Briefly, in the hands-on sessions, the participants were divided into 5 groups with 4 members. Each group received their necessary reagents and materials. Each group was conducted experiments including perfusion fixation of mice, cryostat sectioning of mice brain, DAPI fluorescence staining of pituitary gland, cresyl-violet staining, cell culture, and stereotaxic ICV injections by themselves under the control of facilitators. The invited speakers were Anurag Kuhad, Professor, University Institute of Pharmaceutical Science, Panjab University, Chandigarh, India “Pharmacological investigations beyond monoamines to discover new therapeutic strategies for depression” and Tetsuya Hiramoto, Professor of Fukuoka Hospital, Japan “Neuroinflammation”. The following core concepts were covered in the training program as lectures/seminars: neuroinflammation, neuroethics, cell culture, DNA extraction, cell viability assay, immunostaining and microscopy, RT-qPCR, ELISA, western blotting, stereotaxic ICV injections, and tracing methods. The students also attended the 7th Annual Meeting of Mongolian Neuroscience Society has been organized as a blended conference that offers both on-site and online attendance due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Eventually, it brought together 98 on-site attendees and 2.4K online watchers and reached more than 45K people this year. There were 17 invited lectures by international speakers from 11 countries including Canada, China, France, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, and the USA, as well as 16 local presentations. Following the hygiene rules during the pandemic, we also provided sanitary kits for all the attendees and faculties during the school. Lectures by international faculties were presented online using Zoom app. Their lectures were transmitted live via Facebook too. The school benefited both the students and the local faculty, contributing therefore to building capacity in neuroscience in Mongolia. The school generated the enthusiasm of the faculty and researchers who want to leverage neuroscience in Mongolia. We are truly grateful for the generous support by IBRO that made it possible to hold the event successfully.