I am welcoming you all to the 5th EDURE-International Research Conference of BK21 FOUR Education and Research Program in the Department of Life Science at Chung-Ang University. It has already been a month since the fall semester of 2021 started.

To all of professors, graduate students, researchers, and undergraduate students, I wish all of you have great achievements on your side and always stay healthy in the face of a pandemic, COVID-19.

Since 2016, BK21 Education and Research program in our department has held a research conference to share the excellent achievements in our graduate students’ performance, as well as to promote research exchanges and collaborative networks among colleagues. In this year, we are pleased to promote this conference to be an international conference by inviting international scientists as keynote speakers.

Particularly, we have an opportunity to have seminal scientists in the cancer biology and genomic research fields as invited speakers and discuss about their research outcomes and recent trends in the research activity. Further, four graduate students who published their work in high-rank journals as the first author were selected among those published in 2020, and will present their work with the best research award and each laboratory will present the latest unpublished results in the poster. We also prepared an excellent research award and a prize lottery in the third session of program today. I am confident that this year conference will provide graduate and undergraduate students with a good opportunity to inspire the courage to become great life scientists in future through various presentations given by international scholars and our colleagues.

Lastly, I would like to express my thanks and gratitude to organizing professors and sponsors, who made this conference possible. Even though we are still in the middle of overcoming Covid-19 crisis, I strongly believe that this international research conference will serve as an opportunity to revitalize and further improve the ‘BK21 FOUR–CAU Education and Research program for life Scientists’ in the Department of Life Sciences at Chung-Ang University.