The workshop took place over three different meetings during which students had the opportunity to dive deeper into the design world and acquired notions about how to build a scientific poster which could be meaningful and effective in communicating their work. The instructor created a very interactive and stimulating environment, where students could explore their ideas and receive insightful feedback from other attendants. The final aim of the workshop was to design and present a poster, which was facilitated by the dedicated Zoom meeting in which Jo helped personally each of the students in improving their work. 

Finally, useful advice on how to behave during a posting session was provided.

The theoretical work was transferred into a poster session simulation, where students could present their poster and receive feedback from each other. At the end of the day, a very constructive and enthusiastic session enabled everyone to improve their presentation style.

Personally, I would recommend this workshop to all PhD candidates. In fact, effective and catchy communication of your work is as important as your research work. I now feel much more confident about how to communicate my ideas and how to interact with those attending my poster. This will greatly alleviate the mental work at my first conference, and I am sure I will approach it with much more confidence and excitement.

Martina Bianchi

https://www.jorichers.com/

For scientists, the know-how of correct image representation in publications with respect to the good laboratory practice, is essential in order to maintain the significance and credibility of your scientific data.

To this end the IGIM organized the Biovoxxel workshop from the 9^th to the 11^th of February 2022, which was held by the bioimaging analyst Dr. Jan Brocher, who introduced us to diverse imaging analysis techniques using the software tool Fiji (ImageJ). This gave us the opportunity to learn practical methods in scientific image handling, processing, and interpretation with the underlying goal to avoid unintentional image data alteration or manipulative adjustments.

Basic skills of working with digital images were educated, covering the comprehension of image metadata and bit depth, as well as setting scale bars or applying lighting and background corrections. Moreover, we got deeper insight in in-depth image analysis techniques, which enable object counting and determination of size and shape, as well as stepwise data or object extraction, or the quantification of intensities.

Overall, the working atmosphere was very pleasant. Mr. Brocher lead us step by step through the program, explaining everything very well in a good speed. He also took his time to answer all the questions that came up. After the course, you will have a basic understanding of the different features of Fiji and you are able to write your own ImageJ macros.

Sarah Trenz and Sophie Schminke

Philipp Gramlich from Natural Science Careers shared his knowledge about a wide variety of topics including application strategies, how to structure your application documents, the job interview, salary negotiations, as well as the importance of networking. The stories about his own applications as well as his anecdotes were always very interesting and insightful.

The Webinars in the morning were a mixture of talks, discussions with all the participants, as well as in smaller groups in breakout rooms. An additional input was provided by the online learning platform, where participants could work in their own time. The mix of reading materials, external sources, videos and short podcasts was nicely balanced. Overall, the learning atmosphere was positive and constructive.

The workshop provided the participants with new insights into the (hidden) job market and also themselves, because finding your dream job requires more than just blindly applying to job ads, knowing yourself and your must-haves and no-goes is vital.

Franziska Kühner

Whether you need some tips for a publication you’re working on at the moment or are just looking for some general pointers on how to write a scientific text, I highly recommend you to participate in this course.

Janette Alford

Cruz Matos de Opitz

Thanks to the highly motivated students and the qualified teacher, the workshop was a great success and we are looking forward to offer the course again next year. Thank you very much Jo!

https://www.jorichers.com/ 

I was particularly interested in the work of Prof. Paul Hudson, who is known for establishing CRISPR Cas for cyanobacteria as well as his synthetic biology approaches. To learn more about him and his work, I invited him to give a presentation for our RTG 1708. It turned out, that our research interests had much in common, so I decided to spend some time in his lab to learn how to use CRISPR in cyanobacteria.

Due to environmental reasons, I decided to travel by train. I was surprised how convenient the journey was and can highly recommend avoiding flying while traveling within Europe. In contrast to my nice journey, it turned out that the time in the lab was not as successful as I initially hoped to. Despite numerous attempts, the CRISPR system was not really suitable to answer the research question I had.

To make my stay a little bit more productive, I used my time to write a book chapter about my research topic. For this it was good that I was not so distracted with my daily routines from Tübingen, like supervision of students or other lab duties. Hence, it turned out to be quite a productive stay in the end.

Thanks to the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes as well as the RTG 1708, all my expenses were covered, which I am very grateful for.

All in all, it was an exciting stay. Despite the fact, that the scientific output was not that large, I still learned a lot by performing research in a different environment and by having thought provoking discussions with people from different backgrounds. Hence, I would recommend other PhD students to spend some time abroad, even if it is just a short stay. Over the course of a four-year doctoral program, there should always be some room for international exchanges.