Successful Closing Symposium Marks the End of 2025 SRP — Promising Results & New Horizons

August 2025 Lausanne, Switzerland

The EPFL Summer Research Program (SRP) culminated today in a vibrant Closing Symposium held on campus, where participating students from around the world presented the outcomes of their two-month immersive research projects. The Tomorrow Foundation was delighted to witness the strong scientific quality, cross-disciplinary creativity, and intellectual exchange fostered by this partnership.

Highlights from the Day

• Student presentations across diverse fields.
  The symposium showcased a wide array of research projects — from structural biology to brain–computer interfaces. One standout was a team working on Reconstructing Visual Experience From Brain Activity, where the group is exploring the use of fMRI recordings and tokenized brainwave data to train multimodal AI models capable of generating visual reconstructions from neural data.
• Showcase of Tomorrow Foundation–supported project.
  Our supported student, Abinoor Dagane Kassim, presented the results of his structural virology project, conducted under the supervision of Professor Aleksandar Antanasijevic. His team of four focused on the structural analysis of the rabies virus glycoprotein (RABV-G). The primary objective was to engineer and stabilize RABV-G variants to prevent unwanted fusion with cell membranes, thereby enabling cryo-EM structural studies and antibody complex formation.

The results were promising: several stabilized variants were identified that reduce fusogenic activity, which opens the door to further high-resolution structural work and immunological assays. However, the team recognized that testing additional stabilizing mutations will be essential to reach the robustness required for full antibody complexing and structural resolution.

• Future direction for Abinoor.
  After completing the SRP internship, Abinoor will return to the University of Debrecen, Hungary, to continue his MSc studies in Molecular Biology. The experience at EPFL has positioned him well for further work on viral immunogens and structural virology.
• Remarks and acknowledgments.
  During the closing session, Professor Aleksandar Antanasijevic, also co-director of the program, delivered a keynote highlighting the importance of international training programs, and explicitly thanked the philanthropic partners, naming Tomorrow Foundation, for their essential support to young researchers.

Our own representative attended the symposium and was deeply impressed by the scientific thinking, depth of inquiry, and professionalism displayed by all participants. We believe this event reinforces the value of our investment in talent and research.

Looking Ahead: Strengthening the Partnership

The success of the 2025 SRP Closing Symposium underscores our enthusiasm to extend and deepen our collaboration with EPFL. We intend to continue supporting African scholars for future SRP cycles, promote the program in Africa and explore additional collaborations.

We express our heartfelt gratitude to the EPFL SRP organizers, the EPFL philanthropy and development offices, Professor Antanasijevic and his group, and all contributing faculty and staff for making this year’s program a rigorous and inspiring affair.

We look forward to what the next edition will bring, and are already excited about the possibilities that further cooperation can unlock.