Meet the Speakers

Basel's speakers Pr Sonja Schmidt and Tommaso Caudullo are ready to introduce you to their research in the 2024 edition of Pint of Science!

Pr Sonja Schmid- 13 May 2024 at Klara

Professor Sonja Schmid is the head of NanoDynamicsLab at the department of Chemistry at the University of Basel.Her primary objective is to elucidate the molecular mechanisms underlying both the functionality and dysfunctionality of proteins, which can precipitate pathological conditions.

Her talk was about the vibrant life at the nanoscale: Proteins are the molecular makers in our body. They perform all vital tasks to maintain life as we know it: cell growth & division, genome replication & repair, energy harvesting & conversion, self-defense & attack, environmental sensing & reaction to it, etc. etc. To do this all, proteins undergo all kinds of dynamic rearrangements which are crucial for their function. However, still most visualisations of proteins are rock-solid static structures. Here, I’ll show you the tricks my lab plays to watch SINGLE protein molecules and how they move to complete their biological tasks at the nanoscale, to keep us alive at the macroscale.

Tommaso Caudullo - 15 May 2024 at Bibliotek Bar

Tommaso is a PhD student in Rainer W. Friderich lab of neuronal circuits and computations, at Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research.

He presented an informal guide to recognizing objects: Apples, clouds, chairs. Different across and different within, objects and the fuzzy categories they belong to populate our perception of the world. But how can we know whether we are having a beer or a softdrink? Indeed, how can we recognize or remember any object in isolation, with nothing to compare it to. In this talk, we will be looking for the little pint in our own heads, to define all pints soon to be in our stomach.