Astrid Hielscher

"As the first participant of the DAAD funded Thematic Network program from Germany in Israel I was honored to spend one month in Tel Aviv at the Children's hospital of the Sheba medical center. Under the supervision of the department director Dr. Raz Somech I started to attend in the clinical routine, learning about various types of rare immundeficiency syndroms, such as SCID, CVID, severe Neutropenia, DiGeorge syndrom and many more. Through to the clinical work I started to understand the physiological aspects of these partially very severe syndroms. To get to know more about the genetical background, I participated in the lab learning about diagnostic procedures and research challenges regarding topic. Together with my collegues in the lab I assisted in several methodologies such as, DNA extraction, real-time PCR and flow cytometry. Besides the practical work Dr. Somech and my collegues gave me an overview of several types of immundeficiency syndroms, basics of diagnostics, genetic background as well as aims of future research. Being the first student for the Thematic Network program in Tel Aviv, I can say that this experience was one of the best I had so far during the time of my medical studies. I think it is a great opportunity giving students the possibility to widen their knowledge in a field, that most certainly is not part of regular medical studies. My stay at Sheba gave me exclusive experiences with clinical cases that are really rare and I may have never been in contact with in Germany. It also allowed me to meet very nice and friendly researchers, medical doctors and friends, that had been in all terms very kind and helpful to provide me an unforgetable experience."