News

This year’s first RIGeL Summer Academy took place from 22nd to 24th of June in the a beautiful baroque castle Schloss Hirschberg/Altmühltal. 36 PhD students participated in the Summer Academy, where they gained insight into different research fields of the Sections CBB, Biomedicine, Neurobiology and MEE, exchanged data and got new inputs and ideas for their own projects.

The Summer Academy started on the 22nd of June with a team-building event. In a Team Challenge participants had to solve different tasks either in smaller groups or all together. Not only mathematical skills or memory abilities were needed but also cooperation between the different teams and also between each participant. In this way, participants could increase their capacity for teamwork and get to know each other better.

After the Team Challenge the scientific program of the Summer Academy began with the first talk session in the afternoon. After dinner there was a relaxed get-together with ice cream in the city center of Beilngries.  

On the second and third day of the Summer Academy PhD students presented their projects with wide-ranging topics during poster session as well as talk sessions. The interesting program with 17 poster presentations and 19 talks has been complemented by the method lecture of the company GE Healthcare. They provided participants with different methods of filtration.

The Summer School was concluded with couple of prizes awarded to the most outstanding poster and talk. The best talk was presented by Eva-Maria Rom from the BIOMEDIGS Graduate School about “Evaluation of geno- and phenotypic alterations in luminal B breast cancer using Humanized Tumor Mice (HTM)”. The best poster prize has been awarded to Felix Oberhauser from the MEE section for his poster titled “How expectations affect value perception in an invertebrate”. Furthermore, five participants of the Summer Academy who asked the most of the scientific questions have been awarded with the Questioner Prize: Barbara Schwertner (Section Biomed), Tobias Killian (Section CBB), Eva-Maria Rom (BIOMEDIGS), Enrico Hupfeld (Section CBB), Roberta Benedetto (Section Biomed).

In summary, it was a very interesting Summer Academy with lots of opportunities for networking and broadening the scientific horizon by getting to know PhD students of other sections better. The coffee and lunch breaks in between as well as two get-together evenings with snacks and drinks provided participants with many opportunities to discuss scientific problems and socialize.

We look forward to the next RIGeL Summer Academy in Weltenburg in September 2017!