PhDs and Postdocs at Summer School in Heidelberg

During July 17th to 19th 2023, the first Summer School of the collaborative research center CRC 1487 “Iron, upgraded!” for CRC PhD students and postdocs took place in the youth hostel in Heidelberg. During these days, content related work, further education and networking were combined.

In a poster session, all attendees discussed methods associated with CRC topics. To learn about mental health in early academic career, Dr. Olga Vvedenskaya, a medic, and co-founder of “Dragonfly”, gave a talk about her experiences during various career steps and a good overview about typical mental diseases in academia. Dr. David Peralta, editor in chief of “ChemCatChem” from Wiley, gave an excellent firsthand insight to the publishing business and the best tips how to get people attracted to the own paper. With Professor Hans Niemantsverdriet and actors of the improvisional theater “The Affirmative” from Mainz we gained some hands-on experiences on presenting scientific results and giving a speech, respectively. Tongue twisters like “Mister Whiskers” and “Whiskeymixer” helped us to deal with struggling in speaking in an easy way. In a teambuilding event, the attendees learned about the history and the secrets of Heidelberg’s old city.

According to the plan, the two PhD representatives of the CRC resigned their job on the last day of the summer school. “It was a great opportunity for all of us to learn key competences beside our daily scientific research”, said Hannah Wilhelm, happy about the success they had with the organization of the summer school. Her colleague Hannah Lamers added: “With these speakers we had a nice mix of people with different perspectives”. Both greatly supported the PhD activities during the past year and contributed to the success of this meeting. Their successors will be Dr. Lingmei Ni and Danny Stark as her deputy.

The doctoral and postdoctoral researchers are looking forward to the next summer school to follow up on these fruitful experiences.

Text: Jan Welzenbach, Hannah Wilhelm, Hannah Lamers, Sun Myung Kim, Giovanni d’Andrea