Last week, we held our MiCRop consortium day at the Allard Pierson Museum. These days are all about stepping back from daily research to focus on teambuilding and exploring new topics.

This year’s theme was medicinal plants, a topic close to our consortium’s work, but an entirely new field altogether. Maxim Bax opened the day with a talk on the historical and modern uses of medicinal plants. Because plants are still very much useful as medicine in the modern day. For example our modern malaria medicin: artimisinin, is derived from the plant 'sweet wormwood', which grows like a weed in its native area.

Then, we toured the museum, including the site where the Allard Pierson Museum will recreate the Universiteit van Amsterdam's historic medicinal plant garden (Hortus Medicus), which was still in use in the 17th century.

The day continued with a bias training from Downsideup, workshops on medicinal tea making (given by Marjolein Stolk) and botanical drawing. As well as a tasting of some unique herbal liquors (thanks to Distilleerderij ‘t Nieuwe Diep).

Events like these bring our spread-out consortium closer together, helping us return to joint research with renewed energy and inspiration.