Now that it is one month since the FEBS (Federation of European Biochemical Societies) retina in a dish 2026 course is over, it is easy to remember the energetic lecture hall, the lively poster sessions, the conversations continuing over coffee and dinner, and the generally happy atmosphere throughout the week.
It is somewhat more difficult to remember just how uncertain everything felt only a few months earlier.
From 8 to 12 June 2026, we organized the FEBS Advanced Lecture Course Retina in a dish: Methods & applications in life sciences at the University of Eastern Finland in Kuopio. The course brought together more than 80 researchers, trainees, speakers, organizers, and industry representatives to discuss organotypic retinal cultures, acute ex vivo retina preparations, retinal imaging and electrophysiology, disease modelling, drug development, scientific writing, research funding, and academic careers.
In the end, everything went remarkably well. The feedback was excellent, the speakers were engaged, and the participants created exactly the kind of open and interactive atmosphere that I had hoped for.
However, getting there was quite a journey.
How did the idea begin?
The pathway towards the course started in 2024, when I was fortunate to receive a FEBS Excellence Award. As one of the award recipients, I was encouraged by FEBS to consider applying for funding to organize a FEBS Advanced Lecture Course.
This sounded like a great opportunity. It also sounded much simpler at that stage than it eventually proved to be.
In December 2024, I submitted a pre-submission inquiry, a kind of letter of intent, to FEBS. The full application followed at the start of 2025. By then, the idea had to be much more than an idea. Approximately 90% of the speakers already needed to be identified and committed to the course.
This is quite an interesting situation for an organizer. You are asking busy and internationally recognized scientists to reserve time in their calendars for an event that does not yet officially exist. Fortunately, most of the people I contacted were immediately supportive.
In May 2025, we received a positive decision from FEBS. That was, of course, excellent news. It was also the moment when the project suddenly became very real.
We had slightly more than one year to turn the application into an actual five-day international high-level course.
An important step in shaping the course took place in August 2025, when I visited Tübingen for one and a half weeks to learn organotypic retinal culture methods myself. The visit was scientifically valuable, but it was also important for the course organization. I met my co-organizer Blanca Arango-Gonzalez in person for the first time and had the opportunity to discuss the course with François Paquet-Durand, another leading expert in organotypic retinal cultures and an essential speaker for the programme.
Until then, most discussions about the course had taken place through emails. In Tübingen, I was able to sit down with people who knew the methodology deeply and critically reflect on what the course should actually offer. It was probably the first time the course began to feel like a real scientific meeting rather than primarily an application, a programme draft, and a long list of speakers.
Advertising something that still feels far away
During 2025, I advertised the course at essentially every suitable opportunity. I spoke about it at the FASEB Biology and Chemistry of Vision meeting in June 2025 and at several other conferences and scientific events.
The Retinal Degeneration meeting in Prague in September 2025 provided another useful opportunity. I could advertise the course to exactly the kind of researchers and trainees we hoped would attend, but perhaps more importantly, I was also able to meet several of the invited speakers in person and discuss the developing programme with them. These brief face-to-face conversations helped transform formal commitments into something more concrete and collaborative.
I continued promoting the course at the CRATER 2.0 meeting in Warsaw in October 2025 and whenever another suitable opportunity appeared.
The event website was built between September-October 2025, and applications opened at the end of October. The course finally had a public face, a programme, speakers, deadlines, and registration pages.
I assumed that registrations would start appearing steadily.
They did not.
Or at least, they did not appear as quickly as I had imagined.
This was probably the most stressful phase of the entire organization. We had invited an outstanding group of speakers. We had reserved lecture facilities, negotiated hotel arrangements, planned social activities, and started discussing practical details ranging from transportation to poster boards. Yet for quite some time, we did not know whether enough participants would actually come.
Researchers, and perhaps especially PhD students, often register for meetings quite late. Intellectually, I understood this. Emotionally, it was less helpful.
Every new registration felt like a small victory. Nevertheless, the uncomfortable question remained in the background: would we have a proper course, or would we have twenty excellent speakers talking mainly to each other?
The Kuopio hotel problem
Kuopio is a very good location for a summer course. It is surrounded by lakes and forests, the evenings are light, and there are many possibilities for informal activities outside the lecture hall.
Kuopio is also a relatively small city with a limited number of hotels.
To make matters more complicated, it is a popular summer destination for Finnish travellers. As June approached, hotel rooms began disappearing. At the same time, I did not know yet at what capacity the event would actualize.
This created a rather uncomfortable equation. We needed to reserve enough rooms to accommodate all the speakers, but we did not yet know how many student participants there would be…
The hotel hosting the speakers and several of the attendees, Scandic Kuopio, was a beautiful location on the shore of Lake Kallavesi and worked very well during the event. But reaching that point required quite a bit of communication, calculation, negotiation, and occasional worrying about booking deadlines.
Would the speakers share the mission?
Another uncertainty concerned the scientific programme.
I knew most of the invited speakers beforehand, although I had never personally met perhaps one-third of them. Everyone had agreed to participate, but agreeing to give a lecture and becoming genuinely engaged with the mission of a course are not necessarily the same thing.
We did not want to organize a conventional conference consisting of disconnected presentations. The aim was to create a course in which experienced researchers would openly share methods, mistakes, troubleshooting strategies, career experiences, and practical advice with younger scientists.
We wanted speakers to stay for discussions, attend poster sessions, talk with trainees, and contribute to workshops and panels. We wanted participants to feel comfortable asking questions — not only impressive questions, but also basic and practical ones.
Before the course, I could not be certain that this would happen.
Fortunately, it did. The speakers took the course seriously. They participated beyond their own lectures, talked with trainees, joined the social programme, and helped create a collegial atmosphere. This commitment was one of the main reasons why the week worked so well.
The part that basic funding does not cover
FEBS support provided the essential foundation for the course. It enabled us to invite the speakers and cover the central scientific and organizational costs.
However, the basic funding alone would not have allowed us to create the full event we envisioned.
Scientific courses are not built only from lectures. Some of the most valuable discussions happen during poster sessions, dinners, workshops, coffee breaks, or while standing on the deck of a boat on Lake Kallavesi. Social and networking activities are not simply entertainment added around the science. They are part of how scientific communities form.
Obtaining additional funding required many applications, emails, negotiations, sponsorship proposals, agreements, and practical arrangements. Early 2026 therefore became a combination of scientific programme development, LinkedIn campaigns, participant recruitment, budgeting, and fundraising.
To be completely honest: it was a lot of work.
This was my first time organizing an event of this scale. Many tasks that appear small individually become substantial when they accumulate: hotel rooms, buses, catering, dietary restrictions, invoices, grant conditions, speaker itineraries, abstracts, poster schedules, website updates, name badges, dinners, room reservations, technical equipment, photography permissions, and countless emails.
The participants should not need to see most of this work. In fact, when an event runs smoothly, they usually do not. That is probably one definition of successful organization.
A local team forms
Fortunately, I was not organizing the course alone.
My co-organizers, Blanca Arango-Gonzalez and Petri Ala-Laurila, contributed their expertise and networks to the course. I also built a local organizing committee largely from members of my research group.
From around March 2026 onwards, we met every second Wednesday afternoon. As the course approached, the list of open questions gradually became more concrete. And usually longer.
Who would take care of speakers’ transportation? Where would the posters be placed? What happened if it rained during the outdoor programme? How would we transport more than 80 people between the hotel, campus, marina, and evening events? Who would chair each session? How to feed them during poster sessions?
The local organizing committee accepted responsibilities, solved problems, and remained remarkably calm even when I was not. During the course, they were everywhere: running registration, guiding speakers, managing the lecture hall, organizing posters, helping participants, and responding to unexpected situations.
And then people arrived
Eventually, registrations accelerated.
Participants came from Finland, elsewhere in Europe, and beyond. The hotel rooms were used. The lecture hall was full. The poster sessions were busy. People asked questions, introduced themselves to one another, and continued discussions after the formal programme had ended.
After more than a year of planning, it felt almost strange when the course finally began. Until that moment, the event had mainly existed as documents, budgets, spreadsheets, emails, and calendar entries. Suddenly, it had become a real community of people.
The scientific programme covered both the technical foundations and the wider applications of ex vivo retinal research. It included lectures and discussions on organotypic cultures, disease models, pharmacology, imaging, electrophysiology, scientific publishing, grant writing, industry, academic careers, just to name a few. We also offered participants opportunities to receive feedback on manuscripts and research proposals.
The evening programme also mattered. A cruise on Lake Kallavesi, a traditional Finnish evening with sauna and swimming, and numerous informal discussions helped participants and speakers get to know each other beyond institutional titles and publication lists.
That was an important part of the course’s mission.
Three very different keynote lectures
I was especially honoured that Professors Arto Urtti, Marius Ueffing, and Krzysztof Palczewski agreed to serve as keynote speakers.
Arto gave a superb lecture about the challenges of drug delivery in ophthalmology. The eye is often described as an attractive target for local drug administration, but anyone working in ocular pharmacology understands how many biological, anatomical, and formulation-related barriers stand between a promising molecule and an effective therapy. Arto was able to explain these challenges with exceptional clarity and scientific depth.
Marius gave a very different but equally memorable lecture. He described his own career and emphasized that academic careers are rarely linear. From the outside, successful careers can look like a steady progression of grants, discoveries, promotions, and prestigious positions. Reality is usually much more complicated.
Almost everyone experiences some version of the “valley of death”: periods when funding is uncertain, experiments fail, positions end, or the next step is not obvious. Hearing this stated so openly by a highly accomplished scientist was important, particularly for the trainees. Scientific careers are not built by avoiding every difficult period. Often, they are built by finding a way through it.
I connected very strongly with Marius, both scientifically and personally. During the course, we spent several evenings talking about careers, science, and life more generally. One of his key messages was: “Why live a boring life?” It clearly resonated not only with me, but also with many of the other speakers.
A related message appeared in one of his keynote slides: “Stay in science only in case you enjoy it.” This may sound almost too simple, but it captures something important. Academic life involves too much uncertainty, frustration, and personal sacrifice to be sustained only by external measures of success. Curiosity, enjoyment, and a sense of purpose are not optional extras. They are among the things that make the difficult periods worthwhile.
Marius also devoted an entire slide to the writer and thinker Yuval Noah Harari. At that point, it became increasingly clear to me that we approach many questions about science, careers, and life from a rather similar philosophical direction.
I very much look forward to continuing these conversations and to catching up with Marius again soon.
The presence of Kris Palczewski had special personal meaning for me.
I joined Kris’s laboratory as a postdoctoral researcher in October 2016 and spent five years under his mentorship. His laboratory taught me a great deal about retinal science, but also about ambition, hard work, persistence, and getting things done.
When I left the University of California, Irvine, and returned to Finland, Kris gave me one final instruction: “You have to invite me to Finland.” As was often the case with instructions from Kris, it was not really presented as optional.
It took a few years, but I finally got it done.
Introducing my former postdoctoral supervisor and mentor as the keynote speaker of a course that I was now organizing in Finland was a meaningful moment. Kris has made landmark contributions across rhodopsin biology, phototransduction, the visual cycle, retinal pharmacology, structural biology, imaging, and therapy development. Equally importantly for this course, he has trained an extraordinary number of scientists who later became independent principal investigators. I am fortunate to be one of them.
His keynote, Biochemistry at the Core of Retinal Research: Past, Present, and Future, connected the history of retinal biochemistry with the questions and therapeutic possibilities that now lie ahead.
The people who made it possible
A course like this depends on many organizations and individuals.
I am deeply grateful to Silmä- ja kudospankkisäätiö, Retina ry, and Suomen Näkövammaissäätiö for their support. Their contributions helped us build an event that extended beyond the minimum scientific programme and offered real opportunities for interaction and networking.
Our sponsors—Diagnosys LLC, Phoenix-Micron, Bayer, Experimentica, and Synaptic Systems—provided important financial and practical support. Their participation also strengthened the connections between academic research, technology development, and industry.
IUBMB and FEBS helped a total of seven trainees attend through travel grants. These grants matter. For an early-career scientist, the cost of international travel can determine whether participation is possible at all.
FEBS Open Bio kindly provided a poster prize for a talented PhD student, and the University of Eastern Finland offered the premises for the lectures, workshops, and poster sessions.
Most importantly, the entire event was enabled by the Federation of European Biochemical Societies. I am particularly grateful to Fiona Veira McTiernan at FEBS for her excellent organizational support throughout the process. Whenever a new question, deadline, or practical problem appeared, Fiona helped us find a way forward.
My sincere thanks also go to every speaker, participant, organizing committee member, sponsor representative, and colleague who contributed to the week.
What did I learn?
The most obvious lesson is that organizing an international scientific course for the first time requires much more work than one initially imagines.
The second lesson is that uncertainty is unavoidable. For months, we did not know exactly how many people would attend, whether the budget would be sufficient, whether the hotels would remain available, or whether the speakers and participants would engage with the course in the way we hoped.
No amount of planning completely removes these uncertainties.
The third and more positive lesson is that people often exceed expectations when they are given a meaningful mission and an opportunity to contribute. The local team took ownership. The speakers invested their time. The sponsors and funding organizations trusted the idea. The trainees arrived ready to participate, not merely to sit through lectures.
By the final day, the course no longer felt like something that I had organized. It felt like something that all of us had created together.
Perhaps that is the best possible outcome for an organizer.
For more than a year, I had repeatedly asked myself whether anyone would actually come.
They came.
And once they arrived, they made all the work worthwhile.
Now that the stress has finally begun to subside, I find myself thinking that perhaps there could be a Retina in a Dish 2 someday.
But not in 2027.
Or, at least, not organized by me.
Henri Leinonen
Kuopio, 13 July 2026