Our alumnus, Riad Hajdarević, is currently at postdoctoral fellowship at the Oslo University Hospital researching glioblastoma (a form of brain cancer) treatments. He designs and conducts experiments in order to get a better understanding of the basic molecular mechanisms of that pathology. He also supervises Master students, and, in the future, he will be mentoring PhD students. You can read his interesting story below!
The time I spent at IUS helped me develop crucial theoretical and practical knowledge for the work I do now. My academic undergraduate education at the study program Genetics and Bioengineering (GBE) at IUS introduced me to lab work. During my Master studies in GBE at IUS, I had the opportunity to learn crucial cell work skills which helped me affirm myself during my PhD at the University of Oslo, but also at my current work as a postdoctoral fellow.
The main advice that I would like to offer is that computational skills are of huge importance. Unfortunately, during our time at IUS there was not much emphasis on Bioinformatics which is a skill every employer in our area of work is interested in. Hence, I would advise students to take programming classes as elective courses (Python and R) and do some training on their own if needed. Once you have proven Bioinformatics skills, it will be easy to get any position you want. Lastly, another advice I want to give to current students is to go a semester or two abroad, learn coding and conducting bioinformatic analysis. Combine your wet lab skills with bioinformatics because that blend will help you immensely.
