May and June are always very busy months in RETORNA. Our DCs and PIs are always quite busy with all the tasks, duties and responsabilities that participating in an European research project involves, but in these 2 months we think the schedule was even busier than usually.
This is mainly because ARVO, one of the most important conference for our project, is usually organized at the beginning of May and attracts both DCs and PIs. In addition to that, the RETORNA annual meeting and summer school usually takes places between the end of May and fist half on June, that being the case also this year: the annual meeting has been celebrated on the 4th of June 2025, followed by a busy schedule of trainings that went on during 2 weeks.
🌟Latest achievements within RETORNA
- the first periodic report submitted has been evaluated as satisfactory by the European Commission
- Ioannis – DC5 passed written and oral PhD qualification exams at the end of May 2025. Congrats to Ioannis!!!
- Maria Eduarda DC1 and Chiara DC10 presented their progress on the project to the School of Doctorate on the 26th of June 2025. This is a mandatory requirement and only with a positive feedback the students can continue in their PhD programme. Very well done!!!
🌟Secondments
- At the beginning of May 2025 Chiara-DC10 started her secondment at the new associated partner University of Colorado in Denver, USA under the supervision of prof. Miguel Flores-Bellver. During the following months she will model Retinitis Pigmentosa using human retinal organoids and hiPSCs-RPE monolayers for her PhD studies.
- All DCs met in Cork, at UCC for a 1 week economic secondment that was planned after the summer school activities
🌟#HiloTesis: learning to communicate with the general public
From the 3rd until the 17th of June 2025 the Spanish national competition #hilothesis has been organized by CRUE and the Foundation Ignacio Larramendi, encouraging researchers from 49 Spanish unversities to participate in the event.
The researchers had to communicate their research using a simple languag, avoiding technical terms and scientific jargon that allows for the understanding of the context, the research topic, and its importance to a non-specialized audience.
The participants described the methodology, the most relevant results, and the conclusions using a logical and engaging structure. The challenge was to create posts that could be informative, approachable but rigorous.
Creativity was also valued: appropriate and appealing use of elements that enrich the content such as emoticons, images, links, videos, or animated gifs.
RETORNA has been represented by our DC4-Enola from Universidad de Alicante.
Check all the threads written by Enola here.
🌟Bioinformatics and RNA seq course
On the 3rd of June 2026, DCs were trained by Dr. Kellie Dean from UCC and Aideen McCabe from UCC, a day to explore the full pipeline from experimental design to reproducible reporting, improving their skills to handle complex RNA-seq datasets using R, DESeq2, and Bioconductor.
Some of the objectives of this course were:
- Designing robust RNA-seq experiments
- Understanding sequencing technologies and library prep
- Processing and assessing raw data quality
- Performing differential expression and enrichment analysis (GSEA, ORA)
- Visualizing and communicating results with PCA plots and markdown reports
The course is part of the RETORNA doctoral trainining programme foreseen for the selected 10 DCs.
🌟RETORNA at conferences
ARVO 2025
Chiara, Ceren, Enola and Yao flew this year to Utah for the ARVO 2025 edition. All of them prepared themselves for the poster session as they all presented one. Check more on each poster here.
🌟 ESGH Milan, Italy
The European Human Genetics Conference 2025 took place in Milan, Italy from May 24-27, 2025.
The theme for this year’s conference is “Genomics: Driving Innovation in Healthcare”, gathering leading experts in human genetics to discuss the latest advancements in genomic research and clinical applications.
Maria’s poster has been selected in the best poster session, given an oral presentation about her research in front of the attendees of the event.
🌟 Boards rotation
RETORNA has 5 boards (managing, quality, research, training and communication). They work together to reach and fulfill the objectives of the project. DCs are also part of the 5 boards. In order to discover and participate in all the aspects of the project, DCs rotate every 6 months to another board. A new rotation period started in May 2025 and will go on until October 2025.
Greetings,
RETORNA team
Main picture: by ARVO