Croucher Summer Courses
Over the years, HKU-Pasteur has built a strong partnership with the Croucher Foundation, which has provided considerable financial support to our course series and programs to promote scientific exchanges with the Institut Pasteur. We share the common goal to educate and inspire postgraduate students and early career researchers from Hong Kong and the wider region with a global vision of health problems and unmet patients’ needs.
Our collaboration has now extended to the organization of two Croucher Summer Courses. Advanced Imaging, which ran from 2015 to 2019, focused on the impact of advanced imaging platforms with high-throughput and next generation “omic” tools to analyze biological events and signaling circuits at single cell and single molecule levels; Emerging Viral Infections, which started in 2018, promotes a multidisciplinary approach to establish common principles for the control current and future viral threats.
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Virology
2018 Croucher Summer Course on Emerging Viral Infections:
the One-Health Approach
This new course series address the grand challenges of containing emerging viral infections with an inclusive One-Health approach combining the fields of animal and human health. Special emphasis will be placed on discussing cutting-edge approaches (such as the use of “omics” tools and the harnessing of big data) to investigate the interspecies transmission of pathogens, a major threat to human health.
2023 Croucher Summer Course Outbreak Investigation & Response to Pandemics
The HKU-Pasteur Research Pole is delighted to announce the return of its renowned Croucher Summer courses with a new edition on emerging viral infections: “Outbreak investigation and pandemic preparedness” from June 18 to 23 2023.
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Advanced Imaging
2019 Deep Learning in Imaging and Cell Biology
Imaging lies at the heart of the investigation of biological processes from the molecular level to entire organisms. While steady advances in microscopy technology are opening new windows into the inner workings of the biological systems, imaging has hard limits stemming from optics of the microscope, chemistry of fluorophores and the necessity to keep the imaged sample alive.
Recently, deep learning has emerged as a powerful approach to making trade-offs between imaging speed, image quality and sample health, that make many previously inaccessible imaging scenarios possible. It has been shown that by incorporating deep learning driven image restoration into imaging pipelines, it is possible to image biological specimen with dramatically reduced laser power, achieve isotropic resolution from under-sampled 3D volumes and even resolve structures below the diffraction limit faster.
2017 Single Molecule & Super-resolution Microscopy in Biomedical Research
The ability to assess and interrogate biological processes at the level of the single cell and the single molecule is revealing a new complexity in which phenotypic cell-to-cell variability emerges as a result of highly deterministic processes. In single cell and single molecule approaches, imaging offers the unique advantage of observing these biological circuits function over time in intact cells, as well as the exciting possibility of quantitatively understanding the deterministic processes contributing to phenotypic cellular variability.
2015 From Systems Biology to Single Cell & Single Molecule Analysis
This new course series address the grand challenges of containing emerging viral infections with an inclusive One-Health approach combining the fields of animal and human health. Special emphasis will be placed on discussing cutting-edge approaches (such as the use of “omics” tools and the harnessing of big data) to investigate the interspecies transmission of pathogens, a major threat to human health.
