Research stay at the Danish Statens Serum Insitut

I have been working on a paper examining the child’s postnatal growth and the risk of type 1 diabetes in the Norwegian Mother and Child Cohort Study. The purpose of the stay was to analyze this research question in the Danish National Birth Cohort.

The results from these two large Scandinavian birth cohorts were then combined by meta-analysis. Since I was not able to bring any data from the Danish cohort back to Norway, and I was not able to bring any data from the Norwegian cohort to Denmark, a meta-analysis provided the best alternative to combine the results from the two cohort. Combining the results from these two cohort provided a unique opportunity to examine risk factors for childhood onset type 1 diabetes, which is a rare condition. During the two weeks that I spent in Copenhagen I was able to be part of an interesting Danish research group and establish new contacts.

While I was in Copenhagen, I was also invited to take part in meeting and I help a presentation for the department that I was working in. This gave me the opportunity to meet the other researchers that were not part of the group that I was there to work with.

After I came back to Oslo, I completed the meta-analysis and drafted the paper. It is now soon ready for submission. I have been continuously communicating with our Danish collaborators which has been working very well. This experience has for me therefore been overwhelmingly positive.

I strongly recommend that anyone who has an opportunity to have a research stay somewhere consider getting such an experience.

It is very interesting to get some new input and learn from how other researchers that those you are working closest with think. If you are able to get some experience handling a different dataset, so much the better, as it will allow you to show that you can handle new challenges. I am grateful to EPINOR for giving me this opportunity!