DGK 2016

One of the conferences that we regularly or traditionally attend is the annual meeting of the DGK (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Kardiologie; german society of cardiology). Last year, we had six people from the IIEG, this year, me and Zouhair represented the IIEG.


The DGK is the most important meeting for the German cardiology society, it is a very clinical meeting, but there are several great talks and posters on basic science too. The only minor flaw personally for me was that almost all the talks were in German. Having said that, some talks were in English too, for instance the one held by myself entitled: "Genetic determinants controlling lipid deposits in different zebrafish strains". After which I had few interesting discussions from the audience for instance, asking the reason behind differential dyslipidemia in different strains of zebrafish ;)


In addition to a huge amount of talks and posters, there were a huge number of industrial pharmaceutical companies advertising their latest products. They even have students as probands so that they can demonstrate their new ECG or other devises. And in case you forgot to bring a pen, just pick your favorite company and get a bunch of new ones. I wonder how many different pens there were, 100, 1000 or rather 100000.

Going to the DGK is not only about the talks and the posters, but also about discussing projects and meeting our collaborators. As every year, we for instance meet Prof. Schunkert from Munich who also came to my session to hear the talk and gave positive feedback afterwards. It is always nice to meet in person and not only via video conferencing. Prof. Schunkert also sent his greeting to everyone at IIEG, Luebeck.

The venue in Mannheim is really perfect for the meeting. It has a big hall in the middle with enough space for all the posters. In addition, the poster session is also very well visited. Although all the presentations were German but the poster were in English (mostly), therefore I spent more time visiting the posters rather than presentations.


As the years before, we stayed at a hotel in Heidelberg, just a few minutes away from Mannheim. This way, we could visit both cities, Mannheim during the day, Heidelberg at night. Strolling the streets of the historic city of Heidelberg at night is just fantastic. In addition, there are so many good restaurants where you can get a good meal after a long conference day. Overall it was a great meeting and the IIEG will definitely keep up with the tradition of attending DGK in next years.

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