Louisa Cheung

BalticSeaBioMed is a collaborative network in the field of Biomedicine comprising the Universities of Eastern Finland (UEF), Southern Denmark (SDU), Turku (UTU), Vilnius (UV), Åbo Akademi (ÅAU) and Karolinska Institutet (KI). We represent a successful, wellfunctioning network with an established track record, and demonstrate a capacity for continuous development and renewal. In this second renewal application for 2025-2026, we address the urgent topic of global health by applying state-of-the-art biomedical methodologies into research concerning the environmental impact of pharmaceuticals, and couple this with the development of pedagogical approaches to train students in skills/competencies required for future employability and successful careers. The network started in 2013, originally “NordBioMedNet” and with a slightly different set of partners to those in the current application, to make the individual biomedicine Master’s programmes at partner universities stronger and internationally more competitive. With the support of Nordplus and Erasmus+, the network has successfully achieved its goals by making competencies unique to each partner university, and educational activities developed by each partner, available to students within all the partners’ programmes. Within the Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership programme, the network has successfully accomplished two projects: Open Educational Resources in Computational Biomedicine (OERCompBiomed), and European Network for Virtual Lab & Interactive Simulated Online learning 2027 (ENVISION_2027). We have developed a range of open educational resources to facilitate the exchange of state-of-the-art expertise between network partners including virtual/ online practical training to complement traditional practical training in the lab. BalticSeaBioMed continues to develop and expand upon this important work.