New ideas and cooperation

These days researchers have the opportunity to participate in huge congresses of thousands of researchers, as well as highly specialized events, such as the Paavo Nurmi Symposia. Internationality is commonplace now, but it wasn’t so in the 1960’s, when the first symposium of the Paavo Nurmi Foundation was held at Haikko Manor near Porvoo. Over the years, the symposia have proved to be an excellent stimulus for the development of Finnish public health research.

Symposia allows researchers the opportunity to discuss, debate and build long-lasting friendships and working relationships. These highly specialized interdisciplinary events, in which most of the participants are working on the same narrowly defined subject, provide a great source of new ideas. Professor Pentti I. Halonen and Sir John McMichael – a prominent Scottish cardiologist – jointly designed the format of the first symposium, on which all subsequent events of the Paavo Nurmi Foundation have been based.