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Hannover Medical School promotes various measures to reconcile family and career. Among the performance-oriented support measures for women, the innovative women's factor in the research LOM enjoys a good reputation not only within the university, but also nationwide. In addition, there is the family LOM, a special form of performance-oriented research funding for female physicians and scientists returning from maternity leave or parental leave. In 2010, the MHH was awarded the University Pearl by the Stifterverband für die deutsche Wissenschaft for its family LOM. This year, Dr. Andrea Grund receives the MHH Family LOM to support her career development after parental leave in the best possible way. Ms. Grund will use the funding to establish a new project on the topic of "Phosphate and cardiovascular diseases" using single cell RNA sequencing, which will serve as a springboard for further third-party funding.

The Senate of Hannover Medical School has awarded Maren Leifheit-Nestler the Venia legendi for Translational Molecular Pediatrics . Her experimental research focuses on fibroblast growth factor (FGF) 23 in the context of left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH), cardiac fibrosis and endothelial dysfunction. Her habilitation thesis entitled "Molecular Mechanisms of FGF23 Cardiotoxicity: From bedside to bench" is a summary of her research activities over the last seven years at the Clinical Department of Paediatric Kidney, Liver and Metabolic Diseases at the MHH. Maren Leifheit-Nestler and her team were able to show for the first time that children with end-stage renal disease, regardless of the high systemic levels of FGF23, also have increased intracardiac FGF23 synthesis, which is significantly associated with the occurrence of LVH. She investigated the relevance of these clinical findings using genetically modified mouse models and a rat model of experimental uremia and analyzed the underlying molecular signaling cascades in neonatal cardiomyocytes, cardiac fibroblasts and human coronary endothelial cells in vitro.

The congress of the International Pediatric Nephrology Association (IPNA) took place this year in Venice at the Convention Center on the Lido. Our Clinical Department was very successfully represented. Ineke Böckmann presented her recently published data on FGF23-mediated activation of the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system and its effect on cardiac hypertrophy and fibrosis in the session Cardiovascular Disesase in CKD as Oral Communication. Maren Leifheit-Nestler also had the opportunity to talk about the effects of cardiac FGF23 synthesis on pathological changes of the heart in mice in this session. Adriana Suhlrie also presented the results of her clinical doctoral thesis on proliferative lupus nephritis to a broad international audience. Wolfgang Ziegler gave a lecture on the use of primary renal epithelial cells from PKD patients to analyze disease mechanisms. In the poster session Chronic Kidney Disease, Mineral Bone Disorders, Anne Schön presented the first data on the effects of active vitamin D on left ventricular mass in children with CKD, a sub-cohort of the 4C study. In the same poster session, Annika Ewert successfully presented the results of her clinical doctoral thesis on Bone and mineral metabolism in children with nephropathic cystinosis compared to other CKD entities and was awarded an IPNA poster prize. Congratulations, Annika!

Attending the Kidney Week of the American Society of Nephrology (ASN) is an integral part of our annual congresses and a real highlight at the end of the year. Presenting our data at Kidney Week gives us the opportunity to discuss our own results with an international audience of experts and to receive valuable suggestions for further projects. We also meet with our international cooperation partners from industry and science and have the opportunity for intensive exchange. This year, Kidney Week took place at the Convention Center in San Diego, which is located directly on the harbor. Maren Leifheit-Nestler presented her two new, worldwide unique mouse models for the cardiac synthesis of FGF23 in the poster session Hypertension and Cardiovascular Disease - Mechanisms and was very well received by the international FGF23 community. Wolfgang Ziegler led lively discussions in the Polycystic Kidney Disease community and presented current findings on the altered adhesion behavior and disturbed polarity of collecting tubular epithelial cells in 2D/3D cell culture models after loss of the ciliopathy gene fibrocystin in the poster session PKD Cellular Pathogenesis, ARPKD, ADPKD, Ciliopathies. Every year it is also very pleasing to see Beatrice Richter again, who, after her doctoral studies in our laboratory, accepted a PostDoc position with our cooperation partner Christian Faul at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and has thus remained loyal to basic nephrological research, as well as with former and new members of the entire Faul Lab.

Thanks to the financial support of the German Society of Nephrology (DGfN) in the form of travel grants, our students were once again able to attend the society's annual conference in Berlin this year. For three of our StrucMed students from 2017/2018, it was their fourth visit to a specialist conference during their active time in the lab. Miriam Wagner presented the final data from her doctoral thesis as a lecture and Saskia Schmaltz had the opportunity to discuss her research project in a guided poster session. Ineke Böckmann's presentation award at the Young Kidney 2018 gave her the chance to present her project again in the Best of Young Kidney 2018 session in front of a broad specialist audience. For our new doctoral students, Isabel Vogt, Matilda Bariani, Jennifer Deppe, Jonas Lischka, Charlotte Mett and Mareike Riechers, it was their first participation in a nephrology congress and Charlotte Rupp, Fiona Eitner and Stefanie Walter, who will start their experimental doctoral thesis next year, followed the clinical and scientific presentations with great interest and gained their first insights into the diversity of nephrology. We would like to take this opportunity to thank the DGfN once again for its intensive and excellent support for young medical students interested in nephrology.

StrucMed students from the 2017/2018 intake Ineke Böckmann, Miriam Wagner and Saskia Schmaltz actively and with great interest took part in the "Young Kidney 2018" meeting in Erlangen. The "Young Kidney" is a forum for younger doctoral students and early career researchers interested in clinical and experimental kidney research, who meet once a year to present and discuss their current projects in the field of kidney research in an informal and personal atmosphere. The Young Kidney Meetings are part of the German Society of Nephrology's (DGfN) intensive promotion of young scientists and are often the basis for long-lasting contacts and collaborations.

Ineke Böckmann received the 3rd lecture award for the presentation of her current StrucMed research project on "Novel role of RAAS in FGF23-mediated cardiac hypertrophy and fibrosis" and may present her data again at the Best of Junge Niere 2018 session of the DGfN Annual Meeting in Berlin in September. Congratulations, Ineke!

This year's Kidney Week of the American Society of Nephrology (ASN) took place in New Orleans. We were delighted to see our former colleague Beatrice Richter, now a PostDoc with our cooperation partner Christian Faul at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, again. Fortunately, Beatrice Richter's abstract on "Different outcome of cardiac remodeling in two mouse models with FGF23 excess and klotho deficiency" was selected by the ASN Scientific Committee for a presentation in the Oral Session Mineral Disease: FGF23 and Mineral Metabolism. Dieter Haffner, Maren Leifheit-Nestler and Wolfgang Ziegler presented their clinical and experimental projects in various poster sessions. To conclude a very successful congress, we visited the oldest French colonial-style sugarcane plantation in the lower Mississippi Valley, Destrehan, and took a boat tour through the cypress swamps of Louisiana, where we could admire alligators, herons, raccoons and snakes.

Dr. Maren Leifheit-Nestler was awarded the Klaus-Georg-und-Sigrid-Hengstberger Research Fellowship at the spring conference of the German Society of Cardiology. The Board of Trustees thus honored the scientist's research project in the field of experimental cardiomyopathy, which is being funded by the Hengstberger Foundation with a sum of 50,000 euros for a period of two years. The scholarship holder and her group are researching the influence of FGF23, a growth factor that is excessively elevated in the blood of children with chronic renal insufficiency, on the cardiovascular system.

The award ceremony took place at the 82nd Annual Meeting of the Society of Cardiology - Cardiovascular Research (DGK) in Mannheim on April 20. The Hengstberger Foundation awards the prize to the best project by an experimental or clinically active scientist with a research focus on experimental and clinical cardiomyopathy. The Klaus Georg and Sigrid Hengstberger Research Fellowship is awarded every two years.

The congress of the International Pediatric Nephrology Association (IPNA) is held every three years and this time took place in the southern hemisphere in Iguaçu, Brazil. Over three consecutive days, the latest findings in the treatment of children with kidney disease and the latest research results were discussed in plenary sessions, free lectures, poster sessions and 30 parallel symposia. Our Clinical Department was also very successfully represented. Maren Leifheit-Nestler was given the opportunity to present her experimental data on active vitamin D therapy for FGF23-mediated left ventricular hypertrophy in rats as part of the symposium Management of mineral and bone disese. At the same time, Dieter Haffner presented a clinical study on the effects of vitamin D on mineral and bone metabolism in children with chronic renal insufficiency. Wolfgang Ziegler presented two papers on impaired epithelial cell function in inherited polycystic kidney disease. Beatrice Richter presented the results of her scientific doctoral thesis on the influence of Klotho on FGF23-induced endothelial dysfunction in a free lecture with great success and was awarded the Young Investigator Award by the IPNA. Congratulations, Bea!

At the end of our trip to South America, we visited the Iguaçu Falls. The gigantic waterfalls were added to the list of the Seven Wonders of the Natural World in 2011 and are located on the border between Brazil and Argentina.