The 2018 VBC PhD Symposium

One little side project I’ve been involved in since last year has been organising the Vienna BioCenter (VBC) PhD Symposium. I’ve attended and helped as a volunteer every year since 2015, though I only wrote about the 2016 symposium on my blog. For those who are not familiar with it, the symposium is held at the Vienna BioCenter in Austria and organised by a group of PhD candidates. We select a theme, invite speakers from across the world, co-ordinate and organise everything. This year’s theme is Metamorphosis – Transforming Science.

The symposium is going to focus on science and change; that includes topics like cutting edge technologies which will change the way science is done, environmental science which can change (and help save) the world we live in and the changing ways that we can communicate in science. So why am I writing about it now? I want anyone who is interested, to hear about it, sign up and attend.

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VBC PhD Symposium 2016

At the beginning of this month, I had the pleasure of attending the VBC PhD Symposium. The symposium is a two-day scientific conference organised by a committee of students from the VBC PhD Programme and, this year, led by Jillian Augustine. Just like last year, I acted as a volunteer to help with the set up and running of the event. Unfortunately, I wasn’t quite as helpful as I had hoped to be as it happened not only at a very busy time for me but when I was sick — and lost my voice for almost two weeks!

The focus this year was “Mind the App: Applications that Bridge Biology and Technology” and had talks that covered a variety of topics from using spider webs to study virus survival to brain-computer interfaces to the history of biological warfare. I do not mean to cover the entire symposium in detail and will merely focus on a couple of aspects which were of particular interest to me.

VBC PhD Retreat 2016 Report

This was something I wrote about two months ago. It was meant to be published on the VBC website but it’s been delayed so much I figured I might as well just put it out here. It seems a waste to just forget about it otherwise. I would’ve included some pictures but I’m not sure where my pictures are. When it gets posted on the VBC website there should be some pictures from other people.

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Aim

A few weeks ago, the merry students of the VBC set off for the 2016 PhD Retreat – two days of science, fun and camaraderie – that was organised by the PhD representatives. This year was my second retreat and the location was the Schloss Hotel Krumbach , just a short distance outside of Vienna. Subsequently, Ines asked me if I would be willing to write a short report on the retreat and what follows are my thoughts. As I was not taking detailed notes, rather than just a run-down of what happened I have chosen to take some main events and expand upon them and how I feel they fit in a larger context.