On Careers Day, this year on April 23rd, four young people visited the IMSF in Göttingen. They learned about the causes and consequences of MS, and techniques used in the lab to study the disease.
The Institute for Neuroimmunology and Multiple Sclerosis Research (IMSF) participated in the nationwide “Zukunftstag” for girls and boys in Göttingen on April 23, 2026. The Careers Day aims to break down gender stereotypes and introduce students to career fields that are often associated more with one gender than the other. Another goal of the event is to give young students insight into the working environments of scientific institutions and to help them better understand the connections involved in medical laboratory research.
“I see what you don’t”
Histological insights into the CNS
This year, our colleagues at the IMSF welcomed three female high-school students and one male student to teach them more about a key focus of our research projects within the TRR274 and the ERC T-Neuron project. These projects investigate how, in multiple sclerosis, disease-causing immune cells infiltrate the central nervous system and subsequently trigger autoimmune damage to nervous tissue. In this context, the students were shown, in an accessible and easy-to-understand way, how immune cells migrate into the brain and spinal cord and how they can be visualized directly within the tissue. Under the guidance of Ms. Birgit Curdt and Ms. Robina Köhler, the students independently embedded, sectioned, and stained tissue samples. In a theoretical session, Dr. Henrike Körner presented images of tissue samples taken with a fluorescence microscope and explained the development of multiple sclerosis in terms understandable to a general audience.
